Introduction

Award-winning novelist Joan Thomas blends fact and fiction, passion and science in this stunning novel set in 19th-century Lyme Regis, England the seaside town that is the setting of both The French Lieutenant's Woman and Jane Austen's Persuasion.

More than 40 years before the publication of The Origin of Species, 12-year-old Mary Anning, a cabinet-maker's daughter, found the first intact skeleton of a prehistoric dolphin-like creature, and spent a year chipping it from the soft cliffs near Lyme Regis. This was only the first of many important discoveries made by this incredible woman, perhaps the most important paleontologist of her day.

Henry de la Beche was the son of a gentry family, owners of a slave-worked estate in Jamaica where he spent his childhood. As an adolescent back in England, he ran away from military college, and soon found himself living with his elegant, cynical mother in Lyme Regis, where he pursued his passion for drawing and painting the landscapes and fossils of the area. One morning on an expedition to see an extraordinary discovery "a giant fossil" he meets a young woman unlike anyone he has ever met?


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Excerpt

From Chapter 24

Mary was ignorant of her own true self when she walked Miss Whyte up the hill to Aveline House, carrying the lady’s satchel. She understood fully only the day she saw them coming up Marine Parade from the Cobb, Miss Whyte in a rose-coloured wrap and pale orange gloves. Then she realized, not merely that he was lost to her, but that she was a feeble-brained stunpoll. She’d nurtured a hope so secret it had been secret to her own self. It was out in the open now, like debris dropped on the foreshore when the tide withdraws. How monstrous it was—it had no place in this world. And then rage seized her, and in her mind she went over all the things he had done—his hanging around the curiosity table and using speech laden with compliments, as though he could elevate her by his very manner of addressing her; his curious questions; his parading himself, a barefoot boy who lived with blackamoors; his talk about subjects decent common folk shut their ears to; his following her down alone to the shore, spreading her hair on the sand with tender hands. She put all these things on a scale and weighed them up against her lunatic hope. And then it was clear to her that she was not mad, but that he certainly was.

Far, far better that he followed her no longer. It brought her the relief you feel when you finally vomit up the bit of rank fish that is tormenting your belly. It cleared her head, the way a killing frost will clear away fog. He would soon be gone away entirely, and she would be left, the person she had always been: sturdy, resolute, wholehearted, tramping down the shore, clambering over rocks with her collecting basket. Her strong legs treading a well-remembered path over the stones, her boot unerringly seizing the only passage wide enough for a foothold. If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. She understood it now, James Wheaton’s text. But while she tramped her mind went slack, and then mischievously Henry came strolling in again in his charcoal jacket with tails and his fawn breeches and high black boots, Miss White mimping along beside him, tipping her face up to his to whisper secrets. Wearing her rose-coloured gown and pale orange gloves, her colours all ajar, as if to say how pert she was, how wilful and daring, as if to proclaim why Henry loved her.

Ravens flock into town, they never come singly: Mary knew this from the year of her father’s death. They had been told for many months that parish support would cease, and the very week that Miss Letitia Whyte rode into town in the London coach, the Overseer of the Parish Poor carried his table out of the churchyard, never to return. He became once again plain George Davis, a sign-painter. It was not his fault, people said. It was decided by the gentlemen in Whitehall, that the poor would never repent of their poverty if they were indulged with parish relief.

There are degrees of everything, Mary thought, standing at the back window watching rain fall on the sea. There were degrees of the high-born and degrees of the poor. Since Richard’s death, they had fallen from the top of the poverty ladder to the rung next-to-the-bottom. How easy it was to topple down, how impossible to haul yourself up! Joseph would never see them starve. But two rents were beyond Joseph—it was the rent that would be their undoing. On the table was a notice from the landlord. They had a week, and then he would be obliged to seize their furniture.

“We must sell what we can ourselves, before it comes to that,” Mary said to her mother, turning back and sitting at the table, where she was making rush lights. Molly agreed. The cupboard could go—there was not much to keep in it in any case. And the two rush chairs: they still had a bench to sit on, and the stool. But they would not sell the round table from the workshop—without the table, they could not hope for income at all.

Lizzie lay face down with her braids hanging over the edge of the cot and dreamed of picking mushrooms. At Axminster a girl went to pick a mushroom and found a golden ring around the stem. “Our Lord put it there,” Lizzie said. “And he led the girl to find it.”

“Nature put it there,” said Mary. “A lady walked in the field and she dropped it and by hap a tiny mushroom grew up within the circle.” At the table Mary stripped the tough skin from a reed and dreamed of her own windfall: a new intact fossil. She would not try to picture it, for it must be another such creature as no one had ever seen. Something to bring the scholars running down from Oxford with their purses at their waists. Something that had not been described, so that she herself could write a text describing it. She had been distracted, but she would focus now and find it. But day after day, she wandered the shore and returned with nothing but threepenny curios. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. As a child Mary Anning was vaccinated with cow pox. Why was this important in the novel?

2. What moved you most about the dilemmas Mary Anning faced in her life?

3. What draws Henry De la Beche to Mary Anning? Which of them has more to offer the other?

4. How did Henry’s unusual childhood shape the youth, and then the man, he became?

5. Because of Mary Anning’s fossil finds, the characters in Curiosity struggle to understand the natural world and time differently. Why is it so hard for them to change?

6. Curiosity begins in 1809, the year Charles Darwin was born, and ends in 1824. Which character in Curiosity comes closest to anticipating Darwin’s work?

7. A special question for readers who have read Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures: As a novelist, Tracy Chevalier had a different theory of which gentleman Mary Anning may have fallen in love with. How does having a different love-interest reshape Mary’s story? What other differences do you see in the way these two novelists have interpreted historical fact?

8. A special question for readers who have read John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman: John Fowles was very interested in Mary Anning and said that he saw her as the secret heroine of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. What do you think he meant?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Joan Thomas' web site

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