Unlike Austen’s heroines, Elizabeth acknowledges that she will never have the “solid smugness” of married women but be relegated to the “formless and unpredictable” life of a spinster. Elizabeth Philpot is one of three middle-class unmarried sisters who are forced to move to the “remote, shabby watering hole on England’s southwest coast” after the marriage of one sister and of their brother, the latter who made clear his intentions to sell the family property to buy another for himself and his new wife.

Mary Anning is the working-class daughter of a Lyme Regis cabinetmaker, barely able to read or write and who sells “curies” (or fossils) to tourists to bring extra money to the family. Their story takes place in the Regency Period made famous by Jane Austen, but though Austen’s novels typically end with marriage, “Remarkable Creatures” subverts this familiar pattern by telling her story in the alternating voices of two women without “prospects.” Tracy Chevalier, author of “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” immerses readers in that time in “Remarkable Creatures,” a novel based on the lives of two English women who made significant contributions to paleontology in defiance of the restrictions of their era, gender and class. 23, 4000 BC) and that it contained all of God’s creatures, on whom He lavished loving and continual care.

But just 200 years ago, the word “paleontology” hadn’t been invented and Britain’s Geology Society was just a few years old, its very existence a careful negotiation between science and religion, where some believed that Earth was formed on a specific date (Oct.

Today, most people understand that animals can become extinct, whether as a consequence of a giant asteroid or because of our own pattern of habitat destruction, climate change and pollution that have endangered hundreds more.

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier