The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel. Reimagining the Lives of Mary Anning, Caroline Herschel, Mileva Marić, and Ada Lovelace through the Lens of Literature

Christine Müller-Dittrich The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel Reimagining the Lives of Mary Anning, Caroline Herschel, Mileva Marić, and Ada Lovelace through the Lens of Literature SALS Studies in Anglophone Literatures Eckart Voigts (Ed.) Band 47 Christine Müller-Dittrich The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel Reimagining the Lives of Mary Anning, Caroline Herschel, Mileva Marić, and Ada Lovelace through the Lens of Literature Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier Müller-Dittrich, Christine: The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel: Reimagining the Lives of Mary Anning, Caroline Herschel, Mileva Marić, and Ada Lovelace through the Lens of Literature / Christine Müller-Dittrich. - Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2025 (Studies in Anglophone Literatures, Vol. 47) Zugl.: Bremen, Univ., Diss., 2024 ISBN 978-3-98940-102-0 (Open Access) Cover Design: Brigitta Disseldorf Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Der Text dieser Publikation wird unter der Lizenz Creative Commons "Namensnennung – Share Alike (CC BY-SA 4.0)" veröffentlicht (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode.de). Eine Verwertung, die den Rahmen dieser Lizenz überschreitet, ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlags nicht zulässig. Das gilt insbesondere für die Bearbeitung und Übersetzungen des Werkes. ISBN 978-3-98940-102-0 WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier Bergstraße 27, 54295 Trier Postfach 4005, 54230 Trier Tel.: (0651) 41503 Internet: https://www.wvttrier.de E-Mail: [email protected] Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who has accompanied and supported me on the long and challenging but also deeply satisfying journey to completing this dissertation. First, I would like to thank my doctoral supervisor Norbert Schaffeld, who supported me with his great professional expertise, valuable feedback, and constant motivation and thus contributed significantly to the success of this dissertation. Thank you so much for your patience and for the advice you gave me in all stages of this project. I am very happy and grateful for the excellent supervision and the wonderful time I had as a member of your working group at the University of Bremen. Without you and your belief and trust in me I would never have started this dissertation. I would also like to thank Martin Willis for his constructive and important feedback on my project and the fruitful discussions we had on the various occasions we met in Bremen, Delmenhorst, and Cardiff. I am very thankful and glad that you agreed to be my second supervisor and that you travelled all the way from Cardiff to Bremen for the defense of my PhD. I would like to thank my former colleagues at the institute for English-Speaking Cultures at the University of Bremen and the various people involved in the Fiction Meets Science project, with whom I enjoyed an enriching experience, both professionally and personally. A special thanks goes to Jennifer Henke, Katalina Kopka, and Kim-Nicola Kück who have accompanied me throughout the entire doctoral process. You were a constant and important source of support during this time and I thank you for all the helpful feedback you gave me along the way – without you, this time would have been only half as enjoyable, and I do not know how I would have managed without our little support network. A big thank you also goes to the members of my colloquium, Karin Esders, Vanessa Herrmann, Jana Nittel, and Paula von Gleich. The discussions with you were a great help and inspiration to me. I would also like to thank my family, especially my parents, Johanna and Volkhart Müller, who have always supported me relentlessly in everything I do. Finally, I thank my husband, Malte Dittrich, for always being there for me, for never making me feel bad about working on my dissertation on weekends or late at night, and for cheering me on when I lacked the motivation to write. I would never have finished this project without you and I am very much looking forward to all the future projects we can now embark on together. Christine Müller-Dittrich September 2025 This dissertation was written during my affiliation with the University of Bremen, Faculty 10: Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bibliothekstraße 1, 28359 Bremen, Germany. The open access publication of this dissertation was supported by the publication fund of the State and University Library Bremen. Material from MÜLLER, CHRISTINE, “The ‘Mother of the Theory of Relativity’? Reimagining Mileva Marić in Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein (2016)”, published in Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, edited by Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp. 317-336, has been reproduced in this book with permission of SNCSC. First ideas and earlier versions of small parts of the introduction and conclusion as well as chapter 3.1 have been published in: MÜLLER, CHRISTINE, “Women and Science in Tracy Chevalier’s Historical Novel Remarkable Creatures (2009),” published in Contradiction Studies – Exploring the Field, edited by Gisela Febel, Kerstin Knopf, and Martin Nonhoff, Springer VS, 2023, pp. 259-276. Table of Contents 1 Introduction: Biofiction and the Herstory of Science ............................................... 1 1.1 The Aim and Approach of this Study ....................................................................... 2 1.2 On the Chosen Text Corpus ...................................................................................... 7 1.3 The State of Research ............................................................................................... 9 1.4 The Structure of this Study ..................................................................................... 12 2 Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories, and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory .................................................................................................................. 18 2.1 Real Lives in Literary Fiction: On the Genre of the Biographical Novel .............. 18 2.1.1 Biographical Fiction or Fictional Biography: Terminological Clarifications ................................................................................................. 20 2.1.2 Biofiction as Historical Fiction: An (Un-)Contested Generic Belonging ..... 23 2.1.3 Between Fiction and Biography: The Hybrid Nature of Biofiction ............. 26 2.1.4 Biofiction as a Postmodern Genre................................................................. 28 2.1.5 Life Writing or Story Telling? Biofiction’s Narrative Purpose(s) ................ 30 2.1.6 From Minor Genre to Major Literary Form: The Present-Day Rise of Biofiction ....................................................................................................... 37 2.1.7 ‘Appropriation’ or ‘Silencing’: Biofiction and Ethics .................................. 39 2.1.8 The Famous and the Marginalized: The Preferred Subjects of Biofiction ... 40 2.2 (Re)Imagining HerStory: Female Lives in Biofiction ............................................ 42 2.2.1 The Female Figure in History: A New Literary Presence ............................ 43 2.2.2 From History to Herstory: A Discursive Shift in Writing the Past ............... 45 2.2.3 Women’s History and Feminist Biography .................................................. 47 2.2.4 Similar Goals, Different Means: Female Lives in Herstorical Biofiction .... 49 2.2.5 Of Myths and Stereotypes: Herstorical Biofiction’s Ambivalent Gender Politics ........................................................................................................... 53 2.3 Approaching (Herstorical) Biofiction ..................................................................... 57 2.3.1 Providing Gender-Sensitive Readings .......................................................... 57 2.3.2 Considering the Chosen Subject’s Biography and Reception History ......... 58 2.3.3 Studying the Literary Texts and Its Paratexts ............................................... 61 3 The Lives of Historical Female Scientists in Biographical Novels ........................ 64 3.1 Fossils, Friendship, and a Fictional Love Story: Excavating Mary Anning, “The Greatest Fossilist the World Ever Knew,” in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009) ................................................................................ 64 3.1.1 “I Am Well-Known Throughout the Whole of Europe”: Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, an Unlikely and Unique Heroine in the History of Science ........ 68 3.1.2 “A Mere Child Making Great Discoveries”? Mythologizing Her Story and Downplaying Her Abilities and Achievements ...................................... 75 3.1.3 “How Can a Twenty-Five-Year-Old Middle-Class Lady Think of Friendship with a Young Working Girl?” Chevalier’s Relational Approach to Her Story .................................................................................. 79 3.1.4 “[Are] You the Lightning Girl?” Perpetuating the ‘Anning Child Tale’ ...... 90 3.1.5 “A Little in Love with Him Myself”: On the (Un-)Necessity of Romance .... 97 3.1.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 108 3.2 The Stars, Sibling Love, and a Scientific Fairy Tale: Remembering Caroline Herschel, “the First Professional Female Astronomer in History,” in Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister (2015) ................................................. 109 3.2.1 A Dutiful Assistant to Her Famous Brother or a Distinguished Astronomer in Her Own Right? Caroline Herschel’s Still Disputed Role in the History of Science .................................................................... 114 3.2.2 “A Well-Trained Puppy-Dog Would Have Done as Much”: Herschel’s Carefully Crafted Yet Often Misunderstood Image of Herself ..... 123 3.2.3 A Damsel in Distress in Need of Rescue by Her Savior Prince: Herschel as the Cinderella of Astronomy................................................................... 126 3.2.4 “Let Whatever Shines Be Noted”: The Complex (Inner) Life of the Woman Behind the ‘Great Man’ ...................................................... 130 3.2.5 “What Will She Not Do to Repay Him with Her Gratitude?” (Re-)Writing the Romantic Fairy Tale of Brother and Sister Herschel ...... 137 3.2.6 A “Star […] in Orbit Around William” – Always Second to Her Brother? ... 145 3.2.7 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 150 3.3 Hidden Achievements, Historical Speculations, and the Shadow of a Famous Husband: Rescuing Mileva Marić, the ‘Mother of the Theory of Relativity’, in Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein (2016) ................................................... 152 3.3.1 “I Believe That a Woman Can Have a Career Like a Man”: Mileva Marić, a Pioneer for Women in Science and a Tragic Heroine ...... 157 3.3.2 A Sounding Board for His Ideas or a Talented Scientist in Her Own Right? The Debate about Marić’s Scientific Legacy .................................. 163 3.3.3 “Lost in Albert’s Enormous Shadow”: Bringing Marić from the Darkness of Her Famous Husband’s Shadow into Her Own Bright Light ................. 172 3.3.4 “The Ideal Bohemian Couple – Equal in Love and Work”: The Cautionary Tale of a Gifted Woman in Love with the Wrong Man .... 178 3.3.5 Distorted Facts or a Fictional Truth? Exploring the ‘What Ifs’ in Her Story ............................................................................................................ 185 3.3.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 197 3.4 Math, Poetry, and the Legacy of a Famous Father: Recovering Ada Lovelace, the ‘World’s First Computer Programmer’, in Jennifer Chiaverini’s Enchantress of Numbers: A Novel of Ada Lovelace (2017) ................................. 198 3.4.1 “The Most Famous Woman in Computing”: Ada Lovelace, Pioneer in Computer Science and Feminist Icon for Women in STEM ...................... 203 3.4.2 A Scientific “Genius” or a Delusional “Charlatan”? Diverging Perceptions of Lovelace’s Contributions to and Her Legacy in Computer Science ...... 210 3.4.3 Byron’s Only Legitimate Daughter – The Role of Lovelace’s Parentage in the Cultural Narrative of Her Story ........................................................ 215 3.4.4 “And Why Should I Not Write My Life?” Bringing Lovelace from “the Margins and Footnotes” of the Historical Narrative “to the Forefront of the Story” ................................................................................ 220 3.4.5 “A Mathematical Fairy Weaving Magic with Numbers and Words”: Rightening the Record about Her Scientific Abilities and Achievements .... 227 3.4.6 “To Rise from My Own Achievements, Not My Father’s” – Forever Entrapped in the Daughter Stereotype ........................................................ 234 3.4.7 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 243 4 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 244 4.1 Summary ............................................................................................................... 244 4.2 Outlook ................................................................................................................. 252 5 Works Cited .......................................................................................................... 256 6 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel the established facts about their female figures’ lives and times for their narrative purposes. Michael Lackey emphasizes that writers of biographical fiction or biofiction “consciously and strategically [invent] stories or [alter] established facts about the biographical subject” (American Biographical Novel 6). He argues that authors of biographical novels sometimes deliberately distort the historical figure to enhance the symbolic significance of their stories and present their readers with a different kind of truth (American Biographical Novel 67-68). The very narrative choices made possible by the fictional nature of the literary text at hand and the ways in which they impact the images created of the historical women, their life stories as well as their scientific accomplishments, are what I am particularly interested in here. In the context of this study, I am especially concerned with the interplay between feminist politics and fictional privileges, in the ways in which novelists use their narrative possibilities as writers of fiction in the service of their feminist efforts at telling herstory or how they use them (unconsciously) to undermine their herstorical ambitions. I argue that the biographical novels examined can surely be called feminist for the sole reason that they bring back into collective memory the life stories of historical women long neglected and marginalized by androcentric scholarly discourse on science in the past. The choice of a woman scientist protagonist and with that the centralization of female experiences, concerns, and perspectives, frequently also voices, shows a clear feminist predisposition. However, the realization of this feminist potential within the narrative text itself is at times rather problematic. My argument is that while these biographical novels are clearly interested and engaged in celebrating and commemorating previously neglected and marginalized historical women in science and making their stories, and with that their scientific abilities and achievements accessible to and acknowledged by a contemporary readership, they often repeat, sometimes reinforce, problematic images and ideas of these female figures and their stories instead of challenging and contradicting them. My approach to the chosen novels necessitates a couple of methodological considerations. On the one hand, familiarity with the historical and biographical facts that are known about the chosen person, perhaps even disputed, or lost. As outlined above, authors play with the facts, add to them, change them. Without knowledge of what is known or controversial or perhaps cannot be known, it is impossible to recognize and study the creative use of facts in fiction. On the other hand, an understanding of the dominant image of her in academic and/or popular discourse, i.e., the previous reception history of the chosen person, is central to the present study. As the research questions listed above make clear, I am interested, among other things, in the extent to which the authors make use of already established and possibly problematic images or consciously question and perhaps even break through them. To do this, it is essential to familiarize oneself with the previous portrayal of the chosen female figure. Introduction 7 1.2 On the Chosen Text Corpus My study does not pursue the goal of a comprehensive examination of all existing texts about women in the history of science that can be assigned to the genre of the biographical novel and the English-speaking literary context. Rather, it provides examinations of selected case studies that can be considered representative of the corpus of biographical novels about historical female scientists outlined above. This will allow me to discuss the biographical novels and the life stories represented therein in their complexity (though certainly still not in their entirety). I will carry out the outlined project based on four selected examples from the cycle of novels that I have identified: Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009) which represents the life of the English fossil hunter and dealer as well as geologist and paleontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847) constitutes the first case study. The second example is Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister (2015) which reconstructs the story of the German-born and England-based comet huntress and professional astronomer Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750-1848). Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein (2016) which recalls a period in the life of Serbian physicist, mathematician, and first wife of Albert Einstein, Mileva (Einstein-)Marić (1875-1948) is the third case I will be studying. The fourth and last example is Jennifer Chiaverini’s Enchantress of Numbers: A Novel of Ada Lovelace (2017) which reimagines the story of the English mathematician and computer programmer Ada Lovelace (1815-1852). The four novels selected here share a couple of common characteristics that unite them as the corpus of this study. The most obvious connection is, of course, the chosen subject matter, as they all tell (part of) the life story of a historical female scientist. I have now repeatedly referred to the women featured in the selected narrative texts as scientists. However, this designation is, strictly speaking, incorrect for at least some of the historical figures that feature here. To use the notion of the ‘scientist’ to describe a person who was involved in scientific investigations before the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is anachronistic because William Whewell only coined the term in 1834. Prior to that most people who pursued scientific research would have been referred to as ‘natural philosophers,’ ‘savants,’ ‘cultivator of science,’ ‘virtuosi,’ or ‘men of science’ (Kragh 25). Alternatively, the branch of study they were working in would have identified them. Terms which describe the practitioners of a specific scientific discipline such as ‘astronomer,’ ‘botanist,’ ‘chemist,’ ‘mathematician,’ ‘geologist,’ or ‘zoologist’ had been in existence for a long time (other terms like ‘biologist’ and ‘physicist’ were only coined at the beginning of the nineteenth century though) (Cahan 4, White 154). Taking the history of the word into account, to refer to someone like Mary Anning or Caroline Herschel as a scientist is anachronistic. There is another reason why my use of ‘scientist’ as a linguistic unity for the above-mentioned historical women is problematic and that has to do with the very definition of the term itself. Due to a variety of cultural, educational, and social reasons, women did often not perform the kind of original research that is commonly associated with the ‘scientist’ or its predecessor, the ‘man of science.’ While women have been active and significant participants in the development of scientific knowledge throughout the centuries, due to gendered constraints, their 8 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel participation in the sciences has frequently differed from that of their male contemporaries. Most women who worked scientifically in previous times did so by adopting roles other than researcher, for instance those of assistants, computers, illustrators, popular science writers, translators, patronesses, or teachers, which, while considered suitable for members of the female sex, are generally not seen as doing scientific work in the proper meaning of the word. For reasons of simplicity and because it seems to be widely done so in both public as well as academic discourses on the history of science, I will still group the women together here under the notion of the scientist. The women depicted in the chosen novels come from various places and historical moments, yet all were somehow or other engaged in scientific (here understood as the natural sciences) or mathematical research and the production of new scientific knowledge. As common in the genres of factual biography and biographical fiction, each novel focuses on the life of a noteworthy historical figure who, despite her scientific accomplishments and the attention and acknowledgment these brought for her in her own day, has received little to no attention in traditional historiographical narratives of science or whose image has been distorted in the past. Another common denominator is that the selected case studies all are biographical novels in the narrow sense of the term, i.e., they “name its protagonist after [the] actual historical person” whose life they depict (Lackey, American Biographical Novel 4, emphasis added). This means they are not written in the tradition of the roman à clef, in which the historical figure is covered with a fictional facade. The chosen novels are written by relatively well-known and established authors and were produced by large publishing houses. They might be classified as commercial texts aimed at a general readership. The corpus of texts also resulted from things I wanted to avoid: I wanted to focus on biographical novels that narrate the lives of different women. For some of the women featuring in this study (Anning, Lovelace, and Herschel) several fictional portraits exist. A comparative approach that considers various biofictional representations of the same person and the same life story from a diachronic or synchronic perspective would have been an interesting endeavor as well, as proven, for instance, by Julia Novak in her studies on historical women artists/writers such as Nell Gwen and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2014 and 2016 respectively). However, this is not the goal of this study. If more than one novel about an individual woman existed, I have chosen the one that appeared to be the commercially most successful. I also did not want to overemphasize the work of an individual author by discussing several novels by the respective person in this study. Benedict has written about quite a few women in the history of science, namely Mileva Marić (The Other Einstein, 2016), Hedy Lamarr (The Only Woman in the Room, 2019), and Rosalind Franklin (Her Hidden Genius, 2022). I have chosen her first novel of this kind, which is The Other Einstein. Two characteristics which are common to the selected novels are not the outcome of a purposeful selection but result from the material available on the book market. All novels have been written by U.S.-American women novelists. The disciplinary affiliation of this study to the field of English literary studies made it necessary to confine Introduction 9 myself to novels first published in the English language. The focus that the study places on novels first published in English and thus assignable to the Anglo-American culture context shall by no means suggest that only novelists from Anglophone countries contribute to the recent proliferation of biographical fictions about historical female scientists. Examples such as German novelist Sabine Friedrich’s Immerwahr (2007), Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist’s Boken om Blanche och Marie [The Book of Blanche and Marie] (2004), Spanish author Rosa Montero’s La Ridicula Idea de No Volver a Verte [The Ridiculous Idea of Not Seeing You Again] (2013), or Croatian novelist Slavenka Drakulić’s Mileva Einstein, Teorija Tuge [Mileva Einstein or the Theory of Solitude] (2016) show that the rising literary fascination with the lives of actual women from the history of science is a transnational development. While I chose only novels assignable to the Anglo-American cultural context, a specific English-speaking country was not a selection criterion. The U.S.-American background of the chosen authors (Benedict, Chiaverini, and Brown are American; Chevalier was born in the United States but now lives in the United Kingdom) reflects that so far mostly U.S.-American novelists are dealing with the topic of women in the history of science. The gender of the author was not a selection criterion either. However, in my research, I only came across biographical novels written by female authors. This is why I could not include any male writers here. 5 1.3 The State of Research 6 Focusing on the ways in which contemporary Anglo-American novelists reconstruct and represent the life stories of historical women in science in recently published Englishspeaking biographical fictions or biofictions, this study addresses a gap in scholarship. As I have shown, historical female scientists increasingly appear as characters in popular culture – not only in novels but also in films and plays. However, these fact-based yet clearly fictionalized portrayals have so far received comparatively little critical consideration. Of the four literary examples which constitute the object of study in the present book, only Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures has met with some academic interest by now. The other three case studies chosen here, namely Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein, Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister, and Jennifer Chiaverini’s Enchantress of Numbers: A Novel of Ada Lovelace, have not captivated any scholarly attention at all. This lack of academic consideration paid to the steadily growing text corpus of bio5 This is not to say that male novelists do not care to write about the herstory of science. When looking at filmic or dramatic examples of biofiction, for instance, one can find works produced by men, too. Furthermore, when considering historical novels about women in the sciences that are not rooted in the actual biography of a historical person, one can find a couple of male novelists, too, even though women authors clearly dominate here as well. 6 The state of research provided is certainly not intended to be exhaustive. It does not include any newer publications that might have been released after 2023, which is the year I finished my research for this dissertation. 10 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel graphical novels dedicated to the life stories of historical women in science is surprising given the huge amount of scholarship produced on the genre of biographical fiction, especially on biofiction about historical women, in recent times. The generic hybrid of the biographical novel had long been considered an undesirable even contemptible aesthetic form and had consequently been critically neglected for much of the twentieth century, as Michael Lackey has shown (American Biographical Novel 1-34). However, in the last thirty years or so, academic interest in the historical origins and development, formal characteristics, generic boundaries and locations, thematic concerns, cultural functions, and recent popularity of biographical fiction is growing substantially. Some of the major theoretically oriented works on the genre of biofiction include: Ina Schabert’s monograph In Quest of the Other Person. Fiction as Biography (1990), Martin Middeke and Werner Huber’s edited collection Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (1999), Lucia Boldrini’s Autobiographies of Others. Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (2012), Michael Lackey’s Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (2014), The American Biographical Novel (2016), his edited volumes Biofictional Histories, Mutations, and Forms (2017), the already-mentioned Biographical Fiction: A Reader (2017), and Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe (2018) as well as Biofiction: An Introduction (2021) and Ireland, the Irish, and the Rise of Biofiction (2021), Julia Novak and Lucia Boldrini’s edited collection Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction (2017), and Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben’s edited volume Neo-Victorian Biofiction: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Historical Subjects (2020). For their typological approaches to the genre Ansgar Nünning’s article “Fictional Metabiographies and Metaautobiographies: Towards a Definition, Typology and Analysis of Self-Reflexive Hybrid Metagenres” (2005) and Marie-Luise Kohlke’s paper “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus” (2013) are surely also important contributions to advancing the understanding of the genre of biographical fiction. All these studies have laid out basic understandings of the genre. They provide useful frameworks for approaching fictional narratives that have a historically documented person as their protagonist. It is to these studies that my own work here owes much of its theoretical and methodological foundations. Additionally, many academics have contributed important studies on individual historical figures or collectives of people and the ways in which contemporary biofiction represents or appropriates their live(s). Current novelists show themselves particularly fascinated with the stories of their literary predecessors, especially those of the Victorian period: Oscar Wilde (Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testaments of Oscar Wilde, 1983), Gustave Flaubert (Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, 1984), Lewis Carroll (Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me, 2002), Sylvia Plath (Kate Moses’ Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, 2003), Henry James (David Lodge’s Author, Author, 2004), Katherine Mansfield (Janice Kulyk Keefer’s Thieves, 2004), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Laura Fish’s Strange Music, 2008), Charles Dickens (Richard Flanagan’s Wanting, 2008), Vir- Introduction 11 ginia Woolf (Susan Sellers’ Vanessa and Virginia, 2009), Emily Dickinson (Jerome Charyn’s The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, 2011), or Georg Eliot (Dinitia Smith’s The Honeymoon, 2016), among others, have been recently resurrected by novelists. By consequence, scholars within the field of biofiction studies have often focused on fictional reimaginings of the lives of historical writers. The edited collection of Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars, The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature (1999), Laura E. Savu’s monograph Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative (2009), Bethany Layne’s PhD thesis (Post-)modernist Biofictions: The Literary Afterlives of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath (2013), her edited volume Biofiction and Writers’ Afterlives (2020) as well as her monograph Henry James in Contemporary Fiction. The Real Thing (2020), or Azure Engelbrecht’s dissertation Neo-Victorian Dickens(es): The Hogarth/Dickens Circle and Recent Biofiction (2016), are only a couple of English-language examples here. In addition to these comprehensive anthologies and monographs, innumerous freestanding academic papers on what has been termed ‘literary biofiction’ (Stuart-Reid 68) could be named here as well. While journal articles, book chapters, and scholarly monographs are multiplying around biographical fictions dedicated to historical writers, those featuring actual scientists from the past as their protagonists, e.g., ‘scientific biofictions,’ have so far not raised any academic attention at all within the field of biofiction studies – neither have other dominant vocational groups been the subject of comprehensive scholarly studies yet. This is surprising, indeed, for recent years have seen a real proliferation of anglophone biographical novels which recount scientific life stories – something that also Jan Golinski (2007) and Norbert Schaffeld (2016) have observed in their studies. In addition to the many biographical fictions devoted to the lives of historical women in science, John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus (1976) (about Nicolaus Copernicus), Kepler (1981) (about Johannes Kepler), and The Newton Letter (1982) (about Isaac Newton), Irving Stone’s The Origins (1980) (about Charles Darwin), Claire Dudman’s Wegener’s Jigsaw (2003) (about Alfred Wegener), Neil Belton’s A Game with Sharpened Knives (2005) (about Erwin Schrödinger), Janna Levin’s A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (2006) (about Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing), David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk (2007) (about Srinivasa Ramanujan), Anthony Flacco’s In the Matter of Nikola Tesla (2013) (about Nikola Tesla), Avi Sirlin’s The Evolutionist: The Strange Tale of Alfred Russel Wallace (2014) (about Alfred Russel Wallace), Thom Conroy’s The Naturalist (2014) (about Ernst Dieffenbach), and Louisa Hall’s Trinity (2018) (about J. Robert Oppenheimer), are all examples of contemporary biofictions which have found their subject matter among scientists from the past. While some of these novels have been critically discussed by academics, a detailed discussion of the representation of the historical scientist’s life story is not what the existing studies offer. While the intersections between biographical fiction and the history of (women in) science remain largely undertheorized so far, what has been met with quite some attention in recent years from those working in the field of biofiction studies are the connec- 12 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel tions and tensions between biographical fiction and women’s history or herstory. The literary texts at the center of attention in this study clearly belong to what Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill have observed to be a recent boom of biofictional narratives about notable women from the past (10, 16, cf. Novak, “Notable Woman,” “Feminist to Postfeminist”). Female-centered biographical fictions have not only met with critical acclaim and commercial success, but have in recent years become a growing field of research for feminist literary and cultural scholars interested, above all, in the gender politics inherent in these fictional reimaginings of actual historical women’s life stories. The scholarly output is growing substantially. One of the latest additions is undoubtedly the edited collection by Novak and Ní Dhúill, Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (2022), to which I had the honor of contributing myself. Other studies to be named here are Stephanie Bird’s Recasting Historical Women (1998) and James Fitzmaurice, Naomi J. Miller, and Sara Jayne Steen’s edited collection Authorizing Early Modern European Women: From Biography to Biofiction (2021). Not specifically dedicated to biofiction but still oftentimes featuring discussions of biographically-based examples among its text corpus are the various studies on the historical woman’s novel, which have also developed into a flourishing subfield within historical fiction studies (see for example: Nünning 1995, Wallace 2005, King 2005, Cooper and Short 2012, Barlow 2014). Given the predominance of historical women artists and writers in contemporary herstorical biofiction, it might seem little surprising that the scholarly focus is mainly directed towards literary or artistic biofictions again, with the huge number of biofictions about women scientists not receiving any attention. Nonetheless, the available publications have been tremendously helpful for developing my own arguments in this study. The present study will draw from and build on existing critical examinations of the feminist politics of herstorical biofictions and thus situate itself within the field of biofiction studies. It seeks to add a new perspective to a growing body of scholarship dedicated to contemporary biofictions about historical women, one that has so far not considered the many novels depicting female scientists. By focusing on the ways in which contemporary women writers reimagine the lives of historical female scientists within their present-day biographical novels, the scholarly contribution of this study lies in its discussion of a body of literary texts that has so far not received much critical attention from academics. The academic value of this study is also to be found in the crucial contributions it makes to ongoing discussions about the functions and values of the genre under discussion, especially its usefulness for telling herstory. 1.4 The Structure of this Study The analysis of the selected biographical novels about historical female scientists forms the centerpiece of this work. A couple of theoretical and methodological considerations precede the four chapters dedicated to the examination of the literary texts. Grouped together in chapter 2, these background chapters provide the critical framework against which I analyze the chosen text corpus. I begin with an investigation of the genre the Introduction 13 authors chosen for this study use for their literary explorations of the history of women in science, that is the biographical novel. Naming their protagonists after historical women in science and offering fictional(ized) accounts of their life stories or parts thereof, the literary texts at hand can all be described as biographical fictions or biofictions. Chapter 2.1 offers some basic reflections on this booming but also much-discussed genre, in which biographical facts are fused with artistic imagination. It explains some of the distinctive features of and key issues surrounding biographical fiction as they are presently being discussed within the thriving field of biofiction studies. The biographical novel is an interesting hybrid genre which, according to current scholarly opinion, is situated between life writing or biography and (historical) fiction combing elements of both. In addition to a basic understanding of the genre, its historical origins and development, central features, and generic location, the chapter focuses primarily on the genre’s characteristic relationship between fact and fiction, or more precisely, on the question of how far a fictional narrative is allowed to go with the biographical template and where its ethical and moral boundaries lie, if it has them at all. Despite the increasing number of critical studies on the biographical novel, there continues to be much confusion about how exactly the genre can be defined. This chapter should not be understood as an attempt to fill in the gap and to give a clear, absolute definition. It is rather characterized by my effort to make the plurality of understandings fruitful for the texts under discussion in this study. While the first background chapter places the chosen novels into a generic context, the objective of the second background chapter 2.2 is to situate the chosen literary texts within the ideological (gender-political) context from which they originate and to which they contribute. In terms of ideology, literary scholars regularly connect female-centered historical biofiction with feminist ambitions to rewrite and revise history from the previously neglected or marginalized perspectives of women, efforts that came to be known as herstory. In this chapter, I will discuss the feminist endeavor of herstory, its goals and manifestations (especially in the genre of biography), and show how present-day novelists are reflecting and carrying on these ambitions in fiction. A special focus will thereby be placed upon the question of how biographical fiction, because of its hybrid nature, might be seen as especially suitable and useful for the feminist endeavor of narrating women’s lives. The goal of this chapter is also to point to some of the insights that academics have gained regarding the feminist or gender politics of contemporary femaleoriented biofictions. The chapter will show that biographical novels which centralize the lives and accomplishments of actual women in history and thus give visibility and voice to their previously often marginalized and omitted perspectives, experiences, and concerns are frequently and oftentimes rightly so applauded for the ways in which they challenge our traditional, male-focused understanding of history. They allow to reinstate women’s stories to the historical record and our cultural memory and to reinterpret their lives from a gender-sensitive point of view. However, herstorical biofictions have been accused of by scholars as sometimes also reinforcing cultural myths and patriarchal stereotypes surrounding historical women and female lives. They, at times, reproduce and 14 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel thus confirm the problematic images and conservative plots that feminists contest. Their potential for subversive feminist historiography must therefore, scholars have suggested, be treated with caution. Before delving into the analysis of the gender politics of the chosen biographical novels about the herstory of science, chapter 2.3 will address some methodological considerations. As alluded to above, this study situates itself methodologically in the broader field of feminist literary criticism, especially gender-sensitive approaches to representations of historical women and their life stories as developed by scholars in the fields of life writing and historical-biographical fiction studies. I will examine the available historical-biographical literature about the respective woman and her life and times alongside the literary texts at hand. In doing so, my aim is not to evaluate the respective novel’s faithfulness to historical evidence and/or biographical truth (if such a thing even exists) as well as the dominant narrative of her story in scientific and/or popular discourse. I am familiarizing myself with the details of her story – as far as they are documented and can be considered reliable – to be able to see where the novelists use their poetic license in the biofictional retelling of her life, where they add to, deviate from, or change the historical-biographical record as it exists. Likewise, I am studying her reception history, the ways in which her life has been represented in the past, to see the ways in which the novels challenge and contradict the dominant cultural narrative of her story, and with that some of the patriarchal stereotypes and cultural myths that surround it, or reproduce and repeat it. Thus, I will also read the novels against the background of the individual’s biography and reception history to see in what ways the novels critically engage with and perhaps even reject the myths and stereotypes that have dominated her story so far. In addition to the literary text itself I am discussing selected paratextual elements. Like all works of literature, biographical novels are narrative constructs that reveal their meaning through an interplay of different aspects. The paratexts are interesting discursive spaces in which the authors often disclose their novelistic motivations for writing about the chosen woman, the goals they seek to accomplish in telling her story through a fictional lens. In the paratexts they also often discuss the relationship between historical facts and creative invention, and reveal some of the omissions, additions, or changes they made to the biographical record of the chosen woman’s life story. I am considering both epitextual and peritextual elements and thus aspects within the novel itself, such as the afterword, author’s notes, or acknowledgements section, but at times also elements outside the novel, such as reviews by critics and interviews with the novelist. The main part of the present book, which is chapter 3, consists of the examination of the selected biographical novels about historical female scientists. I will discuss the chosen narratives individually against the background of the outlined framework. Each chapter will focus on a specific aspect of her story and the historical-biographical scholarship existing. As just pointed out, in my analyses of the selected literary texts, I will draw on ideas developed by current research on the genre of biofiction and especially herstorical biofiction. I will also consider some concepts and debates from recent femi- Introduction 15 nist scholarship on the history of women in science whenever they are relevant in the context of the respective woman’s life story and its literary portrayal in the chosen biographical novel. The novels are discussed in chronological order based on their date of publication. Chapter 3.1, the first analysis chapter, will deal with Tracy Chevalier’s fictional reconstruction and representation of the life and times of Mary Anning in her biographical novel Remarkable Creatures. Particular attention will be paid to the relational approach the novelist has chosen to adopt: the pairing of Anning’s story with that of her friend and fellow fossilist Elizabeth Philpot who is known to have functioned not only as her colleague but as her mentor and advocate. In retelling Anning’s story by means of her relationship with Philpot, Chevalier addresses and appreciates an aspect of her chosen heroine’s biography which has been rarely discussed by scholarly research so far, namely the role of friendship and collaboration in her life, the kind of sisterly support and solidarity Anning had received from like-minded women in science. The pairing of Anning’s story with that of Philpot allows Chevalier also to highlight the remarkability and exceptionality of Anning in the context of the history of women in science: the double odds of gender and class despite which she succeeded in the male-dominated world of early nineteenth-century geology and paleontology and eventually entered the annals of history. However, as I will show, it is by means of this relational approach that Remarkable Creatures also continues, even emphasizes, a rather problematic, if, unfortunately still dominant and highly stereotypical image of Anning that has often worked to downplay or even dismiss her experience and expertise as a fossilist. Furthermore, Chevalier’s reliance on gendered clichés of female lives and women’s relationships with each other as playing out in an entirely invented romantic interlude undermines the revisionist potential of this novel. Chapter 3.2 focuses on Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister, a novelistic reimagining of the life of German-born England-based astronomer Caroline Herschel. Despite her own scientific accomplishments, among them the discovery of eight comets as well as her important cataloguing work, Herschel has so far usually been perceived as nothing but the dedicated and dutiful assistant to her famous astronomer brother. Even today, biographers, historians, and laypersons alike often remember Herschel more readily as William’s self-sacrificing ‘Cinderella sister’ rather than as a significant scientist in her own right. As I will show, Brown’s biofictional account of Herschel’s life continues rather than challenges this problematic and patronizing portrayal of the female stargazer. Undoubtedly, through its fictional exploration of Herschel’s otherwise inaccessible interiority, the biographical novel at hand represents an important revisionist intervention into the oversimplified image that has determined the historical memory of this pioneering woman in science throughout the centuries. Nevertheless, while Brown transforms her chosen historical subject from a one-dimensional stereotype into a multi-dimensional and clearly sympathetic fictional character, I argue that The Stargazer’s Sister does not qualify as a feminist revision of the dominant patriarchal representation of her story. I criticize this fictionalized version of her life for perpetuating, even reinforcing, 22 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel pletely identical concepts. The difference between the concepts lies in the unalike emphases they place upon biographical representation and fictional creation – something that is already suggested linguistically when considering the arrangement of nouns and adjectives. After all, “[n]ouns always trump adjectives,” as writer Thomas Mallon once aptly put it (qtd. in Kohlke and Gutleben 15). Vanessa Guignery thus cautions against using them as synonyms, for the different emphases the respective notions place on the biographical and the fictional element might raise very different expectations in readers and by consequence also reviewers and critics of the literary text at hand. She explains that [t]he distribution of nouns and adjectives is of utmost importance as a biographical novel explicitly presents itself as fiction and therefore does not need to validate the information it conveys, whereas a […] fictionalised biography should, at least to a certain extent, be accountable for the facts referred to. (162) Thus, while the designations biographical fiction and fictional(ized) or novelized biography are frequently used interchangeably, they still emphasize different genres, namely fiction and biography, and thus carry different meanings. As it seems to be the more widely used term, I prefer the notion of biographical fiction and the compounded form biofiction. I use it synonymously with that of the biographical novel. In biofiction, the fictional recreation of the historical subject does not necessarily have to cover the whole life. Indeed, in contrast to factual biography which typically strives for completeness, “a biographical novel will usually select only a few dramatically interesting episodes and a specific period of the subject’s life, and expand these as much as possible,” Guignery argues (161-162). Biography is, while inevitably selective, generally expected to cover the whole story, or should cover as much as possible in the case of a still living person, though not necessarily chronologically from ‘cradle to grave’ (Lee 8). By contrast, the focus of the biographical novelist can only be directed towards certain parts of a chosen person’s life story. The criterion of completeness, which Hermione Lee defines as essential for biography proper (8), does not apply to biographical fiction which ranges from stories covering only a few moments in a person’s existence to full life cycles. The examples chosen for this study illustrate this: while Chiaverini and Brown cover almost the entire life stories of their chosen subjects, Chevalier and Benedict concentrate only on one specific chapter. What is essential in biofiction is that the factual basis of the fictional story becomes immediately and unmistakably clear to the reader through the unity of names between the novels’ protagonists and the real-life figures they are modelled after. The fictional characters of biographical novels, Lackey emphasizes, cannot only be based on the historical individuals they represent but must bear their names. Through his insisting that biographical fiction encompasses only those novels which “name its protagonist after an actual historical person” (American Biographical Novel 4, emphasis added), Lackey clearly distinguishes the genre from the roman à clef, in which the real-life story of an authentic figure is overlaid with a façade of fiction, including a fabricated name. Some scholars have contested this criterion of the name, however. Kohlke, for instance, also Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 23 discusses as biofiction literary works with “supposedly non-referential, made-up characters and plots, [but] which are nonetheless extensively modelled on famous historical subjects […] often with little or no attempt at any effective disguise” (11). She refers to them as “appropriated” or “glossed biofiction” which she positions in contrast to “realist” or “named biofiction” (11, cf. Kohlke and Gutleben 6-7). Ina Schabert, too, lists a couple of historical novels based upon real figures in disguise, among them Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946), as examples of what she terms fictional biographies (Fiction as Biography 42-43). However, it is Lackey’s definition of the genre that most researchers in the current field of biofiction studies seem to agree upon when looking at the kind of novels which they choose to investigate and/or refer to in their respective scholarly works. Lackey’s understanding of the genre of biographical fiction has therefore also been adopted for the present study. 9 2.1.2 Biofiction as Historical Fiction: An (Un-)Contested Generic Belonging What already resonated with the definitions and examples given so far is that biographical fiction deals primarily with the lives of historical individuals. Theoretically at least, it seems that biofiction could also be written about contemporary persons. After all, biography, too, is not only dedicated to the already-deceased but at times written about the still-living. Yet practically, and possibly for the ethical, moral, and legal reasons that accompany the genre’s playful and sometimes bold handling of the historical-biographical facts on the subject’s life and times, the protagonist of a biofictional narrative is usually “a figure from the past of whom the author could not have direct, personal experience” (Schabert, Fiction as Biography 3). Ina Bergmann suggests that biofiction is commonly understood “as being implicitly accompanied by the adjective ‘historical’” (“Historical Biofiction” 310). She therefore proposes the modified term ‘historical bio9 Consequently, not only those novels which approach the history of women in science via a completely fictional character, like Elizabeth J. Church’s The Atomic Weight of Love (2016), Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things (2013), Joyce Carol Oates’ The Man without a Shadow (2016), Diane Smith’s Letters from Yellowstone (1999), or Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (2016), to name but some examples, have been excluded from this study. Furthermore, those literary works have been left out, which, in the style of the roman à clef, tell a story based on an actual historical figure, but nevertheless conceal their factual basis by using fictional names for their protagonists. The central characters of Amy Brill’s The Movement of Stars (2013) and Lily King’s Euphoria (2014), for instance, are only inspired by but neither named after nor completely based on the historical figures they represent, namely the American astronomer Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) and the American anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) respectively. Even though these novels clearly invite their readers to understand the fictional stories in view of these women’s actual biographies, not least through direct comparisons in the afterwords or author’s notes included in the respective books, and while some researchers might have included them for that in their studies, because they use fictional names for their protagonists they have not been considered here. 24 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel fiction’ to emphasize the genre’s focus on former lives (“Historical Biofiction” 310, cf. Bergmann, “Poe’s Shadow” 248-249). Kohlke and Gutleben point to “biofiction’s deathorientation” (20) which manifests in the genre’s preferred choice of “already dead historical subjects” as the respective novel’s focal point as much as in the genre’s “fascination with subjects’ dying moments” (25, 20). They explain that “making us privy to historical subjects’ dying moments, when individuals are at their most vulnerable, stripped of confidence in the face of their imminent extinction as they face up to their superfluidity to the world, which will go on without them” is a “typical move of biofiction” (19). Since biographical novels look overwhelmingly into the past, many scholars subsume the genre under the umbrella term of historical fiction. Most essentially, the gerne of historical fiction can be defined as “fiction set in the past” (Johnson 1) which is written from research and not personal experience (Johnson 1). 10 While Lackey advocates “a narrative space uniquely its own” (“Narrative Space” 3) within the realm of fiction for the biographical novel, most other researchers in the field of biofiction studies connect the biographical novel to the established genre of historical fiction. Kohlke, for instance, notes that “fictional life-writing of real subjects has established itself as a significant subgenre of historical fiction” (4). Bergmann, too, claims that the genre of historical biofiction “can be considered a subcategory of the new historical fiction” (“Historical Biofiction” 320) as it “shares its trajectories of recovery and revision” (“Poe’s Shadow” 248). Likewise, Schabert sees fictional biographies or biographical fictions as possible variants of those literary works, in which “collectively known history is thematized,” e.g., historical novels (Der Historische Roman 34, translation mine). The biographical novel’s belonging to historical fiction was already suggested by Georg Lukács. Lukács, who is frequently still seen as “the most influential and thoughtful critic of the historical novel” (de Groot 13), had great difficulties with “the popularity of the biographical form in the present-day historical novel” (Lukács 300). For Lukács, the biographical novel is part of historical fiction, albeit “an irredeemable aesthetic form” even a “bastardized version,” as Lackey has shown (“Narrative Space” 1), since it fails to achieve what he defines as historical fiction’s aim. In his fundamental study The Historical Novel (1937), Lukács dedicates a whole chapter to “the problem of biography” in historical fiction (301, for the whole chapter see 300-322). He emphasizes its inability to achieve the historical novel’s goal of portraying “the great driving forces of history” because of its focus on the psychology and biography of a historical figure (321). He claims that in the biographical novel, which focuses on the life of a single heroic person, the historical reality is misrepresented and distorted since “the character is inevitably exaggerated, made to stand on tiptoe, his historical calling unduly emphasized while the real objective causes and factors of the historical mission are inevitably omitted” (314). 10 While the time span between the moment of writing the novel and the setting of the narrative has been a matter of much debate among historical fiction scholars and novelists, it is beyond dispute that the narrated story must lie outside the author’s own life and times and must subsequently rely on historical research and not personal memory (Johnson 1). Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 25 He adopts a view shared by many historians who say that “biography is a misleading way of writing about the past [because] concentration on an individual life distorts historical processes and can trivialize or over-personalize events” (Lee 14). Lukács points out that [w]e may generalize this weakness of the biographical form of the novel by saying that the personal, the purely psychological and biographical acquire a disproportionate breadth, a false preponderance. As a result, the great driving forces of history are neglected. They are presented in all too summary a fashion and relate only biographically to the person at the center. And because of this false distribution of weights what should be the real center of these novels – the given historical transformation – cannot make itself felt sufficiently strongly. (321) For Lukács the biographical novel is thus “doomed to aesthetic failure,” to put it with Lackey (American Biographical Novel 2). Lukács sees novels that place too much emphasis on individual biographies as unable to achieve what he understands to be the central goal of the historical novel, namely to represent the forces that drive history forward (33). The great historical persons who become the protagonists of biographical novels are pushed to the periphery of his ‘classical historical novel,’ where they may only appear to underline the historical context of the story, while “more or less mediocre, average” heroes, “who, in their psychology and destiny, always represent social trends and historical forces” and thus function as “historical-social types” should be at the center of the narrative (Lukács 33-35, cf. Lackey, American Biographical Novel 1-34). Lukács’ definition of the historical novel, which he largely developed from Walter Scott’s Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), has long dominated the public perception and academic discussion of the genre of historical fiction. In the present day, however, Lukács’ definition is no longer considered the measure of all things as, for instance, Schabert’s typology of historical fiction proves. Schabert considers the restriction of the historical novel to the kind of narrative that Lukács defined based upon Waverley as problematic (Der Historische Roman 34). For her, as for many other current scholars, Lukásc’s classical historical novel is but one possible variant or subgenre of historical fiction; the fictional biography or biographical novel, in which an actual historical individual’s life and times are at the center of attention, is another (see Schabert’s typology of the genre in Der Historische Roman 34-91). Bergmann, too, notes that the classical or traditional historical novel à la Lukács has developed into a new kind of historical fiction that is characterized increasingly by generic hybridity (“Poe’s Shadow” 248-249). When adopting such a broad and more general definition of the genre of historical fiction one can certainly locate the biographical novel under this umbrella term, even though some scholars, Lackey perhaps most vehemently, have also contested this generic allocation. The generic allocation of biographical fiction to the historical novel depends very much on the respective academic’s understanding of the genres under discussion. For Lackey “biographical novelists do something radically different from historical novelists” (“Agency Aesthetics” 6). Therefore, biofiction is not historical fiction – neither is it a form of biography in his understanding of the genre. It is a genre that seems to resist 26 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel traditional generic classifications altogether and thus deserves “a narrative space uniquely its own” (Lackey, “Narrative Space” 3). Lackey’s rejection of the labels of historical fiction and biography indicates his diverging approach to the genre. Contrary to most scholars, the above-mentioned included, who understand biofiction as a form of life writing and thus as being engaged in biographical representation albeit with different means than the writer of straight or scholarly biography, he sees it as not involved in the representation of the historical past nor a person’s biography (“Agency Aesthetics” 6). Lackey claims that biofiction engages in the creation of a fictional story and a living character which just happens to be based upon the real life of a historical person (“Locating and Defining” 6). For him, biographical novelists are “using rather than representing history and biography”; they are not pretending “to give readers unadulterated historical or biographical truth” (“Agency Aesthetics” 6, 7). They can thus be neither called historical novelists nor biographers. He argues that [w]hat readers want from the historical novel is an accurate representation of ‘the realities of that time,’ but what they want from the biographical novel is a model of a figure that transcends the deterministic forces of history and the environment, and this is something that places the protagonist of the biographical novel in irreconcilable conflict with the protagonist of the historical novel. (“Agency Aesthetics” 8-9) What resonates here is a different understanding of the genre. I will come back to this shortly. 2.1.3 Between Fiction and Biography: The Hybrid Nature of Biofiction Biographical fiction is generally understood as a “hybrid genre” (Novak, “Nell Gwen” 374) which is “placed somewhat uncomfortably between historiography and the art of fiction” (Novak, “Biographical Fiction to Historiographic Metafiction” 146). Indeed, the use of the historical subject’s actual name, as Layne points out, “situates biofiction on the ontological frontier between biography and fiction” (Henry James 3). Practitioners of the genre combine two ontologically different forms of writing about the past, namely the factual or referential genre of biography as well the fictional genre of the (historical) novel – something that is already visible in the generic term biographical fiction, Guignery notes (161). With her modified genre designation historical biofiction Bergmann not only seeks to emphasize the authors’ preferences of writing about past rather than current lives, as discussed above, but to linguistically convey the two-fold generic roots of this literary form, which lie in both biographical writing and historical fiction (“Historical Biofiction” 310, “Poe’s Shadow” 248-249). Biographical novels, as Nünning notes, blur traditional generic boundaries and thus “bear witness to the fact that the conventional dichotomy between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ has of late been called into question” (“Fictional Metabiographies” 364, 366). Undeniably, the traditional differentiation between factual and fictional writing, which has long been considered unproblematic, has been severely challenged by postmodernists’ revelation of the “numerous parallels between real-world stories and fictional narratives” (Neumann and Nünning 21). Consequently, the strict, positivist demarcation between factual and fictional literature has Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 27 become increasingly destabilized and the biographical novel, which fuses “fact and fiction, authenticity and invention,” could be understood as the “logical consequence” of this new permeability of the “ontological frontier” separating factual and fictional literary discourse, Guignery suggests (161-162). Biofiction can be seen, Novak agrees, as “the product of a postmodern disregard for generic boundaries” (“Feminist to Postfeminist” 224). Since biofiction crosses the line between the conventions of biographical narratives and the (historical) novel, it is commonly understood as a generic hybrid. The hybridity of the genre has been accounted for with various terms: “in-between genre” (Novak, “Notable Woman” 84), “transgeneric literary product” (Latham 105), “generic cross-breed” (Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies” 367), or “hybrid aesthetic form” (Lackey, “The Rise” 10) are just a few expressions that are in use for the “mixed genre of the biographical novel” (Guignery 161) which fuses “true facts and imagined details” (Latham 105). The hybridity of the genre, its “liminal status” (Novak, “Biographical Fiction to Historiographic Metafiction” 145) at the crossroads of history, biography, and literary fiction, is often reflected on the level of the paratext. Here signals of the presented story’s rootedness in historical-biographical facts co-exist with those that point to its fictional nature. As Kylie Mirmohamadi clarifies, the “interplay between biography and fiction, which is one of the crucial elements of the appeal of biofiction, is often claimed, highlighted, developed and elucidated in the material that exists in, around, and about these fictional texts” (46). Biographical fictions commonly bear the generic marker “A Novel” on the front cover, usually as a subtitle, which suggests that the represented story will surely use the techniques and follow the conventions of fictional writing. In addition to the genre label on the book cover, the legal disclaimer “This is a work of fiction…,” which is always included in similar wording on the first page of every (biographical) novel to prevent libel actions, also functions as an unambiguous signal for the depicted story’s fictionality. This is also the case with the novels chosen for this study which are all subtitled “A Novel.” Apart from Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister, they also all bear a legal disclaimer that emphasizes the fictionality of the presented story on the first page. The publishers of Remarkable Creatures write for instance: “This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while based on real historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.” Given the fact that all these novels are based on real persons’ lives and times, such publishing statements might “strik[e] one as a little bizarre,” as Novak points out (“Experiments” 12). For legal reasons, they may, however, be necessary and understandable. While the subtitle and indication on the front cover emphasize the fictional status of the literary text under discussion, the frequently included bibliographies point to the novel’s basis in scholarly research and historical facts. Biographical novelists also often express their gratitude to the many historians and biographers, without whose works the writing of their fictional texts would not have been possible. Layne argues that by invocating established scholars, writers of biofiction lend their works authority (“Biofiction and the Paratext” 20). 28 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel While they do not include extensive footor endnotes with explanations and bibliographic references as a biographer or historian would be expected to do, all the writers chosen for this study provide their readers with comprehensive lists of sources or recommendations on further reading. They often reveal their writing methods when approaching the chosen subject, the combination of a use of fictional technique and their basis in the practice of scholarly historical research. At the same time, it is precisely by revealing the deviations, adjustments, and alterations that were made from the historicalbiographical material that the fictional nature of the story is emphasized once again. Many biographical novelists untangle the mixing of fact and fiction in their novels in the afterwords, author’s notes, or acknowledgements. Strategies of legitimation such as references to source material, which can also be found in factual biography, exist here alongside strategies of fictionalization. Thus, in biographical novels, the paratext becomes an important discursive space in which the genre’s hybrid nature is discussed and reflected. Mirmohamadi explains, the paratexts often “illustrate the dual and sometimes conflicting assertions of biofictional texts; that they are the result of creative imagination, but still hold some claim to verifiable ‘truth’” (49). 2.1.4 Biofiction as a Postmodern Genre The generic hybridity, the fact that it questions traditional boundaries between established genres, is undoubtedly one of the reasons why many scholars understand biofiction as a “postmodernist literary genre” (Lackey, “Biofiction Studies” 343). Lackey claims that “[f]or many biographical novelists, developments in postmodernism made it possible to fuse biography and the novel” (“The Rise” 2). For Guignery, the biographical novel is the “logical consequence” of a new postmodern understanding of the relationship between fact and fiction, because for writers of biofiction the “ontological boundaries between fact and fiction” have become permeable (162). However, to speak of the biographical novel only as a postmodern genre also rings false, Lackey notes, because “the aesthetic, political, and epistemological innovations of modernist English writers laid the groundwork for what would become the contemporary valorization and popularity of biofiction” (“Biofiction Studies” 343). As he explains: “Lytton Strachey and the new biographers revolutionized the biography by making liberal use of the creative imagination and fictional techniques in picturing a person’s life, while Virginia Woolf made biography and the biographer a central feature of her novels Orlando and Flush” (“Biofiction Studies” 343, italics in original). Lackey acknowledges modernist thinkers like Strachey and Woolf as paving the way to biofiction with their use of fictional imagination in biographical narrative (Strachey) and their metafictional/metabiographical focus on the process and conventions of life writing (Woolf) (“Biofiction Studies” 343). Novak agrees when she points to the existence of several novels from the early twentieth century that meet the definition of biofiction as novels based upon the lives of actual historical figures (“Experiments” 9-10). Biofiction’s association with postmodernism has also other reasons. While biographical fictions certainly form part of “a postmodern blurring of the lines between Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 29 truth and fiction” (Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others 6), many of the novels subsumed here are furthermore concerned with what Kohlke with reference to Nünning describes as a “typically postmodernist, self-reflexive ‘epistemological problematization of life writing itself’” (5). Indeed, prominent examples of contemporary biofiction, Nünning observes, are self-consciously engaged in the process of life writing itself, discussing the possibilities and limitations of biographical representation and thus raising important metafictional or metabiographical questions (“Fictional Metabiographies” 365-368). The different degrees to which biofictional narratives are self-reflexively involved with the constructivist process of creating a biographical subject and text and thus engage with the generic conventions of biographical writing become visible in Nünning’s typology of biographical fiction or fictional biography, terms he uses interchangeably in his study: “I would suggest designating these main subgenres, which are of course merely ‘ideal types’ […], as ‘documentary fictional biographies,’ ‘realist fictional biographies,’ ‘revisionist fictional biographies,’ ‘fictional metabiographies,’ and explicit forms of ‘biographic metafiction’” (“Fictional Metabiographies” 368). For Nünning, documentary and realist fictional biographies are characterized by references to reality. According to his definition, documentary fictional biographies “have a great number and wide scope of reality references and […] foreground the conventionally backgrounded factual reality” (“Fictional Metabiographies” 368). Realist fictional biographies “represent the life of a real historical individual, using conventional fictional devices and foregrounding the plot against the backdrop of some identifiable historical context” (Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies” 368). In the third category it is not representation but rewriting that is at the heart of the novel. In revisionist fictional biographies, authors “reinterpret the biographical record and revise the formal conventions of traditional biofictions […]” (Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies” 368). In the latter two subgenres it is not the representation of the life story of the biographee that is at the center of the narrative but the reflection about that representation through the biographer. Here, the emphasis is shifted from “the mere writing, or rewriting, of an historical individual’s life to the epistemological and methodological problems involved in any attempt at life writing itself” (Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies” 367). Thus, in biofiction, the influence of postmodernism is not solely confined to the blurring of the fact and fiction divide. It becomes visible in the novels’ self-reflexivity and self-consciousness as attempts of life writing, its questioning and challenging of issues of representation (Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies” 367). However, not all biofictions are experimental/postmodern in their form. Bergmann notes that many are realist and traditional in their depiction of the chosen persons and their stories (“Historical Biofiction” 320). While most of the novels I have chosen for this study seem to rather belong to the category of realist fictional biography – in fact most of the novels that come together in this study are rather conventional realist narratives about the lives of women from the past – at least one example, Chiaverini’s Enchantress of Numbers: A Novel of Ada Lovelace, could also be seen as being concerned with the representation and reconstruction 30 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel of a real life, since here Ada Lovelace is creating her own autobiography and the novel thus certainly draws attention to questions of life writing. 2.1.5 Life Writing or Story Telling? Biofiction’s Narrative Purpose(s) Biofiction is not only a flourishing genre but also a much-debated one. Especially the purpose of biographical fiction has been controversially discussed, something I already hinted at in the beginning of this chapter when pointing to the different terms that are used, sometimes synonymously, to refer to literary texts of this kind. While there seems to be an overall agreement that biofictions are novels based upon the biographies of reallife people from the past and that the protagonists are not only modeled from but also named for the persons they represent, there is far less consensus about what authors aim for and are allowed to do when they write novels based upon the real-life stories of actual historical individuals. Over the last couple of decades, scholars have offered different interpretations of the genre in question. In the huge amount of scholarship produced on biofiction, two dominant positions might be discerned: one position sees it as a form of life writing, and thus also uses notions of fictional(ized) or novelized biography interchangeably with that of biographical fiction or biofiction. But there is another position which understands the genre mainly or solely as a work of creative art though based upon historical persons and their life stories. These scholars clearly reject designations like fictional(ized) or novelized biography. While representatives of the former position argue that in biographical fiction writers use their creative imagination and fictional techniques to tell a life, proponents of the other view claim that in biofiction authors use or appropriate biography to create a good story. Both positions will be explored now by focusing on scholars that might be seen as representative of the respective approach to the genre. As has already been stated above, biographical novels are not biographies insofar as they clearly distance themselves from the genre’s claim to historical accuracy, scholarly objectivity, and the verifiability of the sources. However, biofictions are often understood as a fictional(ized) form of biography, which, analogous to its factual counterpart, is interested in portraying a life but which has, due to its status as fiction, different means to do so and enjoys greater freedom in depicting the chosen subjects and their stories (Novak, “Father and Daughter”). This understanding of the genre is also reflected linguistically, because precisely those researchers who understand the genre through the lens of biography often use or even prefer the term fictional(ized) biography to biographical fiction or biofiction though some also use these terms interchangeably (which leads to some confusion). For these scholars, the narrative privileges of the novelist come into play above all where the genre of factual biography faces limitations and constraints due to the historiographic conventions it follows. The poetic freedoms of authors of biofiction allow them to consider those aspects of a life that are not or cannot be considered in evidence-based biography because they are poorly or not at all documented. In this way, the fictional privileges allow not only a different approach to the subject but also the telling of life stories, which are sometimes barely or controversially Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 31 handed down, because here missing or debated facts can be freely supplemented and interpreted. This view is held, for example, by the German literary scholar Ina Schabert whose study In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography (1990) was one of the first intensive preoccupations with the genre. Approaching the genre from the perspective of biography studies (as might be guessed from the chosen title of her just-cited monograph), Schabert sees biographical fiction as “a special kind of biography,” one that is engaged “in the comprehension of real historical individuals by means of the sophisticated instruments of knowing and articulating knowledge that contemporary fiction offers” (Fiction as Biography 4). Like its factual counterpart, e.g., biography proper, fictional biography, a genre description she uses interchangeably with that of the biographical novel and which linguistically conveys her understanding of the genre, “attempts to get knowledge of the real, other person” (Fiction as Biography 1). For Schabert both fictional and factual biographies seek “to represent the lives of historical persons” and to do so organize “as much factual evidence as possible within the interpretative context” (“Fictional Biography” 287). She emphasizes that fictional biographies are not necessarily characterized by a greater distance from traditional factual knowledge – indeed, as she notes, writers of biographical fiction insist as much on “scrupulous scholarship” as writers of factual biography (“Fictional Biography” 286). Nevertheless, the two forms of biographical writing represent different realities (Schabert, “Fictional Biography” 287). Both genres, she explains, are “based on the facts of history and of an individual’s life […], [y]et the constructs are different in kind” (“Fictional Biography” 295). Unlike writers of factual biography, authors of fictional biography are not bound by the restrictive conventions of historiographical writing but free to use creative invention and imagination when shaping the existing material into a life story (Schabert, Fiction as Biography 60). Precisely because fictional biography wants to represent a life, there seem to be certain limits to the poetic liberties that authors can take with the historical life at hand. For Schabert, fictional biography should remain connected to the persons as they are conventionally known, it should “come as close as possible to individual reality” (Fiction as Biography 32); biographical and historical facts are not to be changed to better fit narrative purposes. Schabert draws a distinction between “an imaginative treatment of the facts, which is desirable, and the imagining of facts, which is not allowed” (Fiction as Biography 67). She speaks of a “responsible imagination” which “as a rule respects the known facts, yet is free to interpret them, enlarge upon them and supplement them according to the certainties of the empathic act” (Fiction as Biography 147). In Schabert’s view, the narrative privileges of writers of fictional biography, may be used where a lack of historical detail requires a compensation to represent the chosen persons and their life stories adequately and accurately. For her, this compensatory function of fictional biography plays out especially when it comes to revealing the chosen persons’ interiorities, their thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, which are often undocumented and thus unable to be shown and known otherwise. She argues that fictional biography 38 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel The Hours (1998) and Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter (1998), were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and one, Cunningham’s The Hours, won the prestigious award (Lackey, American Biographical Novel 24-25). This was the moment when the literary establishment finally recognized biographical fiction as a legitimate aesthetic form, Lackey is convinced (American Biographical Novel, 24-25). By now, the genre of biographical fiction has gained a secure place in the contemporary literary landscape; it has become a “flourishing literary genre” (Latham 103), even “a dominant literary form” (Lackey, “Biofiction Studies” 343). Some describe it as a new “literary phenomenon” (Vicars, “Discarding”). Whether you would like to read about the lives of writers such as Leo Tolstoy (Jay Parini’s The Last Station, 1990), artists like Artemisia Gentileschi (Susan Vreeland’s The Passion of Artemisia, 2001), former presidents such as Ronald Reagan (Edmund Morris’ Dutch, 1999), musicians like John Lennon (Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone, 2015), or philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (Lance Olsen’s Nietzsche’s Kisses, 2006), anyone interested in fictional reimaginings of the real-life stories of onceliving persons will find countless examples on the current book market to satisfy their desires. Given the omnipresence of biofiction on the contemporary literary scene and its increasing popularity with readers and critics, it is not surprising that it has also developed into a flourishing field of scholarly research in recent times mainly so within the Anglo-American academic context. Indeed, the growing novelistic attention to the reallife stories of actual historical figures is in recent years supported with an increasing number of scholarly studies dedicated to this generic hybrid, as was outlined in the introduction. That biofiction “has gained immense popularity” (Novak, “Notable Woman” 84) is often explained by experts with the general societal attraction to the lives of notable (historical) personalities, which also manifests itself in the continuing popularity of factual biography. “The telling of life-stories,” Lee stresses, “has become the dominant narrative mode of our times” (17). In our contemporary culture, there seems to be a great interest in people’s lives, especially the lives of well-known public figures, hence not only the success of biographical fictions but also of factual biographies, Guignery notes (168). “Other people’s life stories fascinate us, and we seem to have an urgent need to record these stories,” Novak points out (“Experiments” 1). That fiction has become such an important “biographic space to explore the lives of real people,” to use Vicars’ words here (“Biographic Space” 107), might have to do with the narrative privileges of the genre which allow writers and readers to transcend the limiting boundaries that determine the writing of lives in traditional historiography and biography and to thus explore aspects that have so far been neglected. Undeniably, what makes the genre of biofiction so attractive and appealing to both writers and readers (and not seldomly highly problematic for literary critics) is that, due to its narrative privileges, its ability to draw on both historical fact and creative invention, it can “boldly go where no biography has gone before” (Novak and Ní Dhúill 1). Novak and Ní Dhúill are convinced that “it is exactly this narrative privilege that accounts for the fascination the genre exerts on its readers, and it is this privilege that critics periodically use as Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 39 grounds for invalidating biofiction” (2). What seems to fascinate us about biographical novels appears to be an interest in aspects that have so far been neglected by traditional historiography and factual biography, Bergmann assumes (“Historical Biofiction” 319). Since biofictions “mingle art and archive,” they can “compensat[e] for historical oversights” (Kohlke and Gutleben 1, 13). They can “speculatively [fill] in gaps in the record to construct feasible supplementary scenarios of what might have happened but went unrecorded” (Kohlke and Gutleben 13, italics in original). While authors of biofiction certainly rely upon the findings of biographers and historians, for this kind of fiction is rooted in facts, they are also able to use fiction to reinvent, to reimagine what has not been recorded; they are able to fill in the gaps, the silences in the historical and biographical record with their creative imagination and artistic invention and thus “shine a light into dark corners and make connections that a professional historian or biographer might be hesitant to make” (Parini 26). Since it combines historical facts with creative invention, the genre of biofiction offers “enhanced scope for recovering lives from the past,” Elizabeth Chappell explains (6). The ways in which this enhanced narrative scope plays out in contemporary biographical fiction seems to be closely intertwined with the kind of subject whose life story is at the center of attention. 2.1.7 ‘Appropriation’ or ‘Silencing’: Biofiction and Ethics In the previous considerations I have already indicated that novels that make a historical person the protagonist of their stories are, despite their status as works of biographical fiction and not factual biography, often subject to ethical questions. For Boldrini, “[e]thical questions are at the core of the form, insofar as it contends with the ethics of assuming another’s voice, of narrating another’s story, and therefore with the ethical implications of literary practices of representation” (“Ethics of Speaking” 20). Boldrini notes that biofictional narratives, whether they are written in the first or in the third person, have “an ethical dilemma at its core” which ranges around the issues of “either appropriation or silencing – with each choice involving the opposite ethical risk” (“Ethics of Speaking” 20, 21). She explains: On the one hand there is the potential to give voice to, or tell the story of, someone whose voice or story may have been forgotten, even erased from history, or whose perspective may need to be re-examined from a different angle. On the other hand, there is the appropriation of those subjects’ voices and stories, without their consent, and with the effect of substituting one’s own voice, one’s own narrative reconstruction, for theirs. (“Ethics of Speaking” 20-21) According to Boldrini, writers of biofictional narratives need to make the choice to “either refuse the appropriation of another’s voice but leave them without any voice; or give them the possibility of having their history represented, but at the cost of substituting one’s voice for theirs, appropriating it, and with that, their identity” (“Ethics of Speaking” 21). For Boldrini, this ethical question and the answer that authors find to it are directly related to the subject whose story is to be told in the given narrative. She refines that 40 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel the ethical implications of appropriating the voice of an emperor, a tyrant, a nobleman, or even a famous writer – of figures that have had the historical opportunity to speak for themselves or of having their stories celebrated – can be very different from those raised by the appropriation of the story or voice of someone who has not had the same opportunity, whether due to subordinated political or social position, or to lack of access to writing or publishing, or to illiteracy. (“Ethics of Speaking” 21) Ksenia Shmydkaya also draws a connection between ethics and the degree of public knowledge about the respective person. She writes that [i]f the subject is a well-known historical figure, there is already a wider general knowledge about her [or him], and the writer of biofiction is less likely to cause ‘serious damage;’ in contrast, the fictionalisation of more obscure figures imposes a greater ethical obligation, because of the potential influence on their afterlives. (276) Boldrini asks whether a writer ever has the right to speak as another, “to ‘usurp’ someone else’s voice and words – at best, to give voice to another, as if that voice (one’s own) were the other’s” (“Hypocriticism” 252). But then, she points out, “what if that subject would otherwise never have been represented? If they did not have the chance of selfrepresentation of his or her own life in his or her own voice? What if it is only through the voice of the other that theirs can be heard, even if only as the reverberation of an echo?” (“Hypocriticism” 252-253). The creative handling of the chosen life, which is characteristic of the genre of biographical fiction, also raises ethical questions, as I have already alluded to on various occasions in the above remarks. 2.1.8 The Famous and the Marginalized: The Preferred Subjects of Biofiction Biographical fiction, like factual biography, is populated by well-known historical figures. A cursory look at some of the most prominent examples of biofictions recently published in the Anglo-American literary world suggests a strong focus on the lives of well-known people. Kohlke defines ‘celebrity biofiction’ as “possibly the most dominant mode” of (Neo-Victorian) biofiction (4). The focus on ‘notable’ historical figures is not surprising when considering that “a degree of well-knownness is the prerequisite for almost any biographical project,” as Mayer and Novak state (149). Indeed, as they note: “life writing and celebrity are closely related as cultural phenomena and practices, conditioning each other discursively as well as economically” (149). Writers’ preferences for prominent subjects can also be explained with pecuniary reasons, Novak suggests: “a famous name guarantees high sales figures” (“Notable Woman” 85). Most basically defined as “the story of a life told by somebody else” (Lee 12), biography, with its historical roots in hagiography, has a long tradition of depicting the lives of noteworthy people whose achievements are considered exemplary (Lee 19-38). Biography’s interest in exemplary lives, as Lee notes, stems from its educational and moral purpose. Biography’s goal is to represent a life worth living, “a model for good behavior or spiritual aspirations” (Lee 16). Even if biography also has the potential to provide exemplary lives which function as deterrence, historically, biography was defined by its didactic purpose of offering positive reference models whose lives are worth imitating (Klein, Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 41 “Analyse” 33). Noteworthiness is not only a criterion for selecting the subject of biography but also of biofiction. While biographical fiction is clearly interested in the lives of famous people, it does not necessarily engage in hagiography, Kohlke notes: “As much as springing from celebratory or commemorative impulses to produce a quasi homage, then, […] biofiction may also serve irreverent or prurient purposes” (8). The narrative privileges of biographical novelists, the possibility to (re-)create the chosen subjects’ lives by combining historical fact and creative imagination, allows writers of biofiction to fill in the blank spaces that exist in the respective historical figures’ stories. These blank spaces are often especially pronounced when it comes to their inner lives. Illuminating the private moments, hidden secrets, and personal thoughts of notable historical figures and thus providing access to their otherwise inaccessible inner worlds seems to be one of the prime motivations behind the writing and reading of biographical novels. Contemporary audiences, as Buisine notes, show “insatiable fervent to know the life of the other in all its details and all its failures, fervent to go into the intimate parts of another’s life, to become a voyeur” (162, italics in original). Novak and Ní Dhúill speak of “contemporary celebrity culture’s voyeuristic desire to pry into the privacy of prominent figures” (21). While biographers can only present a chosen subject’s interiority when it has been recorded, for instance, in personal correspondence, journals, or autobiographies, writers of biofiction are free to use creative invention to envision their chosen subject’s minds and hearts. Indeed, biographical fiction permits its author to use their narrative privileges to reveal “the inner lives, secret desires, traumas, and illicit pursuits of high-profile public figures […] that may have been left out of surviving records, including [the] subjects’ own self-representations, for example in letters, diaries, or memoirs,” Kohlke explains (7). In presenting their subject’s undisclosed memories, personal opinions, intimate conversations, and unacted wishes, novelists may complicate or even outright challenge the dominant perception we have of the person (Kohlke 7). Novak and Ní Dhúill are convinced that, like other narrative choices made by novelists writing about real-people’s lives, this biofictional invasion of a historical subject’s privacy, the retrospective “filling certain gaps that historical persons may have very well left on purpose,” certainly raises ethical issues (21). This seems to be especially true when the motivation behind this gap filling exercise is more voyeuristic than political (Novak and Ní Dhúill 21). In biofiction, “empathetic commemoration and exploitative revelation” (Kohlke and Gutleben 3) often coincide. While famous subjects dominate biofiction, biographical fiction is also seen as a prime way of writing the lives of little-known or forgotten people, as it can imagine where no historical record or only few biographical details exist. James Vicars defines fiction as “a biographic space in which ‘lost’ lives can be recovered and rediscovered” (“Biographic Space” 100), especially female lives which are often less well documented than men’s (“Biographic Space” 105). Indeed, the genre is also used to give voice and visibility to historically marginalized subjects, Kohlke notes, and doing so “commemorates not just the marginalised subjects, but the injustice of their historical disregard and silencing” (10). She defines this variant as follows: “Biofiction of marginalised subjects 42 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel recuperates untold stories of individuals relegated to bit parts, adjuncts, or appendixes in the life-stories of subjects that mattered, while deemed of comparatively little or no matter in and of themselves” (10). She clarifies that “[t]his strand of writing has a clear re-visionary and political purpose, underpinned with feminist and postcolonial tendencies of realigning the centre and margins of discourse, redefining who is accorded power of speech” (10). The reasons of marginalization, Kohlke explains, are not restricted to gender or race but also include other forms of discrimination as well as their intersections (10). One might suggest that the telling of the chosen life becomes indeed only likely because of the possibility to compensate with fictional imagination and artistic invention for a lack of biographical facts about the historical person who might be known but did not leave sufficient traces in the archives of history to be considered in fact-based historical-biographical writing. Biofiction’s great potential for recovering and rediscovering “lost lives” (Vicars, “Biographic Space” 100) and “restor[ing] voice to the historically voiceless” (Kohlke 9-10) might explain why the genre has become an important space for the exploration of historical women and their life stories, as I will discuss in more detail in the next main chapter. 2.2 (Re)Imagining HerStory: Female Lives in Biofiction Having focused on some of the characteristic features of the biographical novel in this chapter, I will now take a closer look at what has seemingly become one of the genre’s favorite subjects in recent times: the historical female figure. Within this recent boom of literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical individual women take on an increasingly central position as protagonists. A quick search of some of the latest publications in the realm of biographical fiction or biofiction shows that novels centered on the life stories of female subjects who lived in previous centuries have entered the literary marketplace in ever growing numbers in the last couple of decades. The whole genre of historical fiction, under which the biographical novel is commonly subsumed, has of late taken a clearly noticeable interest in “the female figure in history,” as Katherine Cooper and Emma Short point out: “previously obscured – she is now palpable, multi-dimensional, and undeniably present” (1). It appears that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century women’s life stories have become so “desirable” and “marketable” (Cooper and Short 1) to writers, publishers, and readers alike that one might speak of “a notable surge in female-centered biofictions” (Novak and Ní Dhúill 10). One might even announce the existence of a new (sub-)genre within the genre of the historical-biographical novel. Nünning and Wallace both describe and define the so-called ‘woman’s historical novel,’ which also encompasses fictional reimaginings of the lives of real women (Nünning, Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion, Wallace, Woman’s Historical Novel). Bergmann coins the notion of ‘herstorical biofiction’ to denote those novels that focus on previously neglected or marginalized historical women and their life stories (“Historical Biofiction” 311, Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed 137, “Poe’s Shadow” 251). The recent prominence of (actual) historical Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 43 women as literary characters might be explained with the predominantly female readership of historical fiction. Irene Goodman suggests that the majority of readers [of historical fiction] are women, and they like to read about other women. Much of history is written by men, which means you have to look for subjects that include women. The most common device is to take a woman who really lived and to let her tell her own story, free from the alleged ‘misrepresentations’ of history. (15) Historical fiction has indeed, Diana Wallace is convinced, become “one of the most important forms of women’s reading and writing during the twentieth century” (Woman’s Historical Novel ix). It is thus not surprising that female figures flourish here. 2.2.1 The Female Figure in History: A New Literary Presence Surely, women and their life stories have never been completely absent from the literary discourse of previous centuries. Scholars like Schabert, Wallace, and Lackey have pointed to examples like Ford Madox Ford’s The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906-1908) about queen consort of England Catherine Howard, Carola Oman Lenanton’s Miss Barrett’s Elopement (1930) on poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Graves’ Wife to Mr. Milton (1944) about lyricist and intellectual John Milton’s first wife Mary Powell, Irving Stone’s Immortal Wife (1944) on writer and political activist Jessie Benton Frémont, Edith Sitwell’s Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) about queen Elizabeth I, and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings (1979) about an enslaved woman of the same name owned by and possibly mistress to American president Thomas Jefferson, to prove that biofictions about historical women can be found throughout literary history (Schabert Fiction as Biography, 31, Lackey, American Biographical Novel 1, Wallace, “Virginia Woolf” 50). However, for much of history, it were above all the lives of notable men that novelists (most of them men themselves) chose to fictionalize in the past. 11 The prominence of “eminent men” as the subjects of biofiction is, as Ina Bergmann points out, hardly surprising given the male-centered focus of much of history writing in the past (“Historical Biofiction” 310). This also manifested itself in the genre of biography, which had long been a “men’s club,” Sara Alpern et al. note (5). For this reason, it is perhaps understandable that biofiction as part of historical fiction and as closely interlinked with the genre of biography was also dominated by male subjects and male writers alike. In recent years an increasing novelistic interest in the life stories of historical women becomes apparent on the contemporary literary scene. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, “fictions about ‘notable’ historical women abound,” Novak notes (“Notable Woman” 83). Already rather superficial research of recently published biographical novels confirms Novak’s observation that the historical female figure has 11 Ina Schabert and Michael Lackey provide many examples of male-dominated and maleauthored biographical novels from the nineteenth and twentieth century that could be cited as evidence here (see, for instance, Schabert, Fiction as Biography 31, 42-44, Lackey, “Locating and Defining” 3, American Biographical Novel 1). 44 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel gained prominence within the generic hybrid of the biographical novel – as she has in the whole genre of historical fiction, scholars suggest (cf. Cooper and Short 1). Bergmann, too, points to “a large number of new historical novels that tell herstory” (“Historical Biofiction” 311). While it is only recently, as Bergmann explains, “that women have begun to step out of the shadow of these eminent men and into their own biofictions” (“Historical Biofiction” 319), (women) writers’ increasing literary curiosity about female lives in the past is clearly visible today – not least in the numerous biographical novels about historical women in science which are at the center of attention in this study. The emphasis I am putting on the interest given to the life stories of historical women shall not gloss over the fact that “eminent men […] are still often at the center of biofiction,” as Bergmann observes (“Historical Biofiction” 320). However, given the authorial preference for and literary predominance of prominent male individuals as the subjects of historical-biographical fictions throughout history, current novelists’ fascination with historical women’s lives is noteworthy and has been met with much scholarly research in recent years, to which also this study contributes. The current boom of fictional narratives about the lives of ‘notable’ women from previous centuries must, on the one hand, be situated in the context of a general explosion of biographical novels in the present day, Novak argues (“Feminist to Postfeminist” 223). As shown in the previous section, biofiction has become an enormously popular genre in the last couple of decades. Various scholars have shown that novels which name their protagonist after the actual historical person they represent, and which are in genretypical way based upon both the documented evidence and creative invention, have experienced a veritable boom in the present day. Contemporary writers’ strong fascination with female life stories must, on the other hand, be connected to a new societal interest about the until recently often ignored or undervalued history of women that has emerged in the context of the feminist movement in the latter half of the twentieth century, Novak is convinced (“Feminist to Postfeminist” 223). She links the present-day trend of representing the lives of historical women and their lives within the genre of the contemporary biographical novel to the women’s history movement – which came to be also known as herstory – when she claims that the origins of these fictional returns to women’s lives are to be seen in “the mid-twentieth-century surge in biographies about ‘notable’ women from the past, as part of the so-called second wave of feminism” (“Feminist to Postfeminist” 223). Truly, historical fiction by and about women, and this also includes novels which are based upon the biography of an actual historical female figure, can generally be seen, Jeannette King argues, as “part of the wider project pioneered by second wave feminism of rewriting history from a female perspective, and recovering the lives of women who have been previously excluded or marginalised” (34). Novak and Ní Dhúill, too, argue that “fiction writers’ noticeable interest, particularly since the 1970s, in the lives of historical women can in part be understood as contributing to the feminist project of ‘reclaiming’ neglected figures through biographical narrative” (8). Bird describes biofictional narratives about historical women as engaged in the “project of giving historical figures a voice” (1). Narratives like these allow women Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 45 to emerge “as subjects in their own right” (Kohlke and Gutleben 13). It has been argued that biofiction about historical women not only stems from but shares many of the concerns of feminist biographies which sprang up in increasing numbers in the context of the second wave feminist movement. Bergmann makes female-centered biographical fiction and the feminist endeavor to revise the male-centered historical record from women’s points of view even linguistically visible when she proposes the term ‘herstorical biofictions’ (“Historical Biofiction” 311, Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed 137, “Poe’s Shadow” 251). She explains that such novels “criticize a silenced discourse of women” by giving voice to the previously disregarded perspectives of actual women in history (“Historical Biofiction” 310-311). By writing novels which privilege the traditionally sidelined or excluded experiences, concerns, and achievements of historical women, many present-day authors, Bergmann claims, “take up the concept of herstory, aiming, like historians, at a feminist revision of history, but doing so by writing historical biofiction centering on women” (“Historical Biofiction” 311). There are many ways in which current novelists’ engagement with the history of women – whether they choose fictional heroines or base their stories on the biographies of actual women from previous centuries – builds on and reflects the concerns of women’s historians who, from the late 1960s and early 1970s onwards, began to systematically redress the gender imbalance of the historical narrative through the recovery of women’s life stories and female historical accomplishments. To understand how current writers’ efforts at telling female life stories can be seen as originating from and participating in the feminist project of women’s history, let me outline what herstory is and does. 2.2.2 From History to Herstory: A Discursive Shift in Writing the Past It is certainly not exaggerated to state “that past histories have generally been written by men about men, and that women have been rendered almost invisible, their roles, contributions, and achievements correspondingly minimised or ignored” (Southgate 94). Historiography’s traditional focus on public achievements and political events had for long functioned to exclude women’s lives and accomplishments as well as the private, domestic sphere, to which they were often relegated by traditional gender role expectations, from the historical record. Indeed, “until not so long ago, history was in every respect a ‘man’s business’,” Nünning emphasizes (“‘Herstory’ als ‘History’” 277, translation mine). For a long time, ‘great men’ were the ones believed to ‘make history’ and it were above all men who wrote about other men’s ‘heroic deeds’ in the public sphere, he explains (“‘Herstory’ als ‘History’” 277). While exceptions can be found for women, surely, never have been completely absent from prior historical narratives, neither as subjects nor authors thereof, “the male-oriented focus of most past historical writing is indisputable,” Southgate underlines (96). If women made it into the historical narratives of previous centuries it were usually only a couple of ‘women worthies,’ those who led men-like lives in the public sphere, as Susan Mann Trofimenkoff points out: “an occasional queen, saint or female ‘first’ might be allowed to slip through the net of exclusivity, but their presence among the Great Men merely accentuates their marginal- 46 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel ity and even more so that of the entire female population which they do not represent in any case” (2). While the male-oriented focus of historiography led to a long-time neglect and consequent absence of women’s life stories and accomplishments from the historical narrative and thus our cultural memory about the past, this began to radically change in the latter half of the last century with the revival of the feminist movement and the emergence of women’s history or ‘herstory’ as part of the so called second wave of feminism. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, herstory became a central issue. Herstory can most basically be defined as the feminist revision, re-evaluation, and rewriting of the traditionally male-dominated and male-authored historical narrative from the longtime sidelined or omitted perspectives of women (OED). Bergmann describes herstory as “a trend that, since roughly the 1970s, has compensated for the absence of women in historiography” (“Historical Biofiction” 311). The notion of herstory is a pun used by some feminists in the field to raise awareness of the fact that history has usually been written quite literally as his and not her story, even though the word ‘history’ is etymologically unrelated to the possessive pronoun ‘his.’ As Casey Miller and Kate Swift explain: “[…] when women in the movement use the term herstory, their purpose is to emphasize that women’s lives, deeds, and participation in human affairs have been neglected or undervalued in standard histories” (135). Herstory redirects historiography’s traditional focus on ‘great men and their ideas,’ as famously defined by Thomas Carlyle in the mid-nineteenth century, to the so far often disregarded or undervalued activities, concerns, experiences, and perceptions of historical women. Since the neglect of women has been universal, the feminist project of herstory affected all areas of the past. The history of science, which is at the center of attention in this study, also became the object of a feminist revision, re-evaluation, and rewriting of the past. The most fundamental concern of historians who engaged in the writing of women’s history, or herstory, was to correct the one-sidedness of much of history writing in the past and to thus counteract the common societal perception that women did not have a history, that they were somehow ahistorical beings, Nünning explains (Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion 95-96). Second wave feminist historians sought to redress the gender imbalance of the historical narrative by uncovering and recovering women hidden from history who had made important contributions or achievements; they wanted to rediscover and restore the lives and achievements of historical women and reveal the activities, contributions, and roles of women throughout the centuries to show that women did indeed have a history. Indeed, the writing of herstory was first and foremost about the recovery and reconstruction of historical women’s activities, concerns, experiences, and perspectives; it was motivated by the need to fill in the “enormous gaps” in contemporary society’s historical knowledge about women’s lives and accomplishments in previous centuries, Catherine Hall emphasizes (5). To compensate for the absence of women from the traditional historical narrative, historians (most of them women themselves) set about discovering what women’s daily lives had been like in the past and what achievements they had made in the male-dominated areas Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 47 of, for example, politics, culture, and science, despite all the barriers that patriarchal societies had frequently put in their ways. They sought to create a completer and more just version of history which could appreciate and honor the contributions of women as much as it did those of men. Reviewing and rewriting the traditionally male-dominated and male-authored historical record by adding the stories of women and exploring the past from a new, female viewpoint, historians not only expanded our knowledge and with that the boundaries of the traditional historical narrative, but, at the same time, drew attention to the conceptual limits of conventional historiography and genres like biography, which had led to women’s exclusion and marginalization within the existing records of the past in the first place. Trofimenkoff notes that they were “primarily committed to discovering and revealing the forgotten and ignored women of the past in order to change the very conception of history which has rendered them insignificant” (1). Women’s historians thus not only revised the historical record, but also rethought the ways in which history should be written. They also shed light on concepts like scientific or artistic genius which had throughout history functioned to render the (supportive, assistive, and domestic) work performed by women invisible (Stephan 13). The recovery, revision, and rewriting of women’s history was thereby always closely interlinked with feminist politics, it was in many cases obviously motivated by feminist ambitions. For their highly visible political agenda, their mingling of history writing and political ambitions, historians in the field of women’s history were often suspected by those within their own professional ranks of “distorting evidence and twisting conclusions” to support the feminist cause (Bennett 14). However, as Bennett explains, the positivist assumption that the writing of history is apolitical which is at the heart of unfounded criticisms like these, has long been revealed as a rather naive understanding of the discipline and its practitioners: History is not, of course, simply ‘the past,’ and historians are not, of course, unbiased reporters or god-like observers who simply reveal the past ‘as it really was.’ […] All recovery of the past entails interpretation, so that no matter how assiduously a historian might seek to let the past speak, he or she unavoidably speaks alongside the historical record. […] Some historians embrace the politics of history and others shun it, but whether we like it or not, history is always and already inflected by politics. (14-15) Feminist historians, it seems, are just more open about their political ambitions than are other historians. In fact, as Southgate notes, in addition to the attention that feminist historians have drawn to long-forgotten figures and long-ignored concerns, it was the emphasis they placed on “the impossibility of any value-free account of history” with which they have most profoundly challenged traditional historiography (98). 2.2.3 Women’s History and Feminist Biography Many historians’ views into women’s past were not only driven by a sense of justice and a wish to set the record straight to create a completer and more just version of history. They were motivated, above all, by the urgent need to change something about the problematic situation of women in the present, especially by the desire to find suitable 54 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel figures in superficial stereotypes, she explains (49). Cooper and Short note that novelistic re-imaginings of historical women’s lives can intervene in existing misrepresentations of their chosen female subjects – for women were often misrepresented or misunderstood based on their gender – and thus “provide a counter-narrative to the male-authored histories which precede them” (4). However, they can also, and sometimes even do so simultaneously, “reinforce certain popular myths surrounding the female figure in history” (Cooper and Short 4) and thus remain faithful to the oftentimes patriarchal agenda of the historical records that precede them. Bergmann points out that the genre of historical biofiction is not only driven by a desire for “revisionism and recovery” but “also tends to nostalgia, sentimentalism, and escapism” (“Historical Biofiction” 319). On a similar note, James Fitzmaurice, Naomi J. Miller, and Sara Jayne Steen argue that writers of female-centered biographical novels face cultural challenges in exploding popular stereotypes while celebrating women’s lives and achievements (19). Thus, although novels about historical women can be classified as feminist in so far as that they draw attention to hitherto forgotten and neglected female lives, a focus on women’s experiences, concerns, and perspectives does not automatically go hand in hand with a feminist portrayal. Against this background, one must be careful when “too liberally applauding [them] […] as examples of feminist historiography,” Kennedy cautions (48). Scholars have, for instance, problematized female-centered biographical novels’ reliance on the narrative patterns and tropes of the romance mode. This is something troubling Kennedy in her study of Philippa Gregory’s biographical novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) about Anne Boleyn’s lesser-known sister Mary (1499-1543). While the author herself sees her novel as feminist historiography, Kennedy points out, it is her choice to write Mary Boleyn’s life in the mode of the historical romance that makes it difficult to really see it as such, for “emplotting history in accordance with the narrative tropes and characterizations that define the romance genre involves the adoption of ideologies about gender and sexuality that undermine the potential for subversive historiography” (49). In Kennedy’s assessment, Gregory’s novel is highly conflicted in its gender politics. While there are “moments of feminist protest and resistance” within the novel, overall, it “represents a largely patriarchal and conservative reflection on women and their social positions” (Kennedy 70). Tying in with the use of romance in the representation of female lives, scholars have also noted that many contemporary novelists continue to remember historical women “in relation to powerful men – as lovers, mistresses, wives, or daughters – ‘legitimating’ attention to these women by positioning them in direct relation to already canonical or culturally powerful men” rather than for their own achievements and abilities (Fitzmaurice, Miller, and Steen 15, cf. Bird; Novak, “Father and Daughter,” “Nell Gwen”; Bergmann, “Historical Biofiction,” “Poe’s Shadow”). Biographical fictions which “breath[e] life into historical women previously relegated to the shadows of the famous men they loved” (Johnsen 6) experience a veritable boom in recent years (cf. Bergmann, “Historical Biofiction” 310, 320, “Poe’s Shadow” 249). Even a rather cursory search reveals numerous examples that could be cited as evidence here, among them Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao (2000), Jen- Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 55 nifer Kaufman and Karen Mack’s Freud’s Mistress (2013), Anne Girard’s Madame Picasso (2014), Naomi Wood’s Mrs. Hemingway (2014), or Betty Bolté’s Becoming Lady Washington (2020), to name but a few. 12 Women who were ‘only’ companions of men’s careers are considered just as much as women that had their own scientific, artistic, or political ambitions but who have not infrequently been lost or forgotten. By consequence of this relational approach to women’s lives, these men then come to dominate the historical narrative of the respective women’s stories and their afterlives in our cultural memory. It has been pointed out that instead of “according the female subject a story of her own,” novels about historical women that “have entered public consciousness chiefly for their association with famous men” often misuse them “merely as a new lens through which to view an already famous man” (Novak and Ní Dhúill 9). Bergmann points to a whole range of novels which, though featuring a historical woman as their protagonist, are not really engaged in telling her story at all but rather seek to narrate his life from her perspective (“Historical Biofiction” 320). Ann Pearson speaks in this context of the literary possibility to use a female figure as a “privileged insider.” Others have pointed out that fictional retellings of historical women’s lives often still emphasize the private drama of their stories at the expense of their abilities and achievements. Emma Short, for instance, observes that writers of both factual and fictional life stories of historical women often still prefer to commemorate their chosen female subject as a “tragic victim” (47), stressing the personal tragedy of her life rather than celebrating the respective woman’s genius. In her paper “Making Up, or Making Over: Reconstructing the Modern Female Author” (2012), in which she focuses on Lilian Pizzichini’s recently released literary biography The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys (2009) on British novelist Jean Rhys (1890-1979) as well as on four contemporary biographical novels about the British and American writers Virginia Woolf (1881-1924) and Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) (Stephanie Barron’s The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (2009) and Susan Sellers’ Vanessa and Virginia (2009) as well as Emma Tennant’s Sylvia and Ted: A Novel (2001) and Kate Moses’ Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (2003), respectively), Short shows that also present-day female authors who seek to rewrite these modern and modernist women writers’ lives for a contemporary audience “do not escape misrepresentations, and are often victims of a cultural tendency to demarcate female genius as both exceptional and unsustainable” (Cooper and Short 4). Short notes that current narrative reconstructions of female literary figures, whether in factual biography or biographical fiction, tend to portray them “as tragic victims of their 12 The similarity of the chosen titles is striking. It seems that identifying the woman protagonist by means of her association with the famous man is almost generic. The definition in terms of her relationship to the respective man is understandable from a marketing standpoint, as his name might still raise more immediate attention than hers and thus promises higher sales rates of the respective book. Yet, this economically driven choice that is presumably pushed by publishers is not unproblematic from a feminist viewpoint as it positions the historical woman as ‘other’ and suggests that her life (only) matters because of her relationship to her partner, that she is an interesting subject only because she was his wife, sister, mother, girlfriend, or lover. 56 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel own mental instability” rather than to depict and celebrate their great literary achievements, something that, in her view, might be explained with a certain “fear towards female authorship and creativity within contemporary culture” (41-42). Short is especially critical of Pizzichini’s approach towards Rhys, for instead of “appreciating her as one of the most skilled and intriguing of modernist writers,” the female biographer, she deplores, “[focuses] almost solely on the negative aspects of the author’s life […] (such as childhood abuse at the hands of a family friend, miscarriages, and a short spell in prison),” representing the author, best known perhaps for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), “as first a helpless victim, then a self-pitying old woman, and above all a tragic victim” (48, 47). Short seems to be particularly concerned about this problematic representation of Rhys’ personality and life for she suspects that being written in the style of the highly popular genre of the misery memoir and marketed as such, Pizzichini’s biography will continue to be widely read and thus have “a significant effect on cultural perceptions and understandings of Rhys” (48). While a biography can “bring a partially forgotten author back into the cultural imagination,” in the case of Pizzichini’s account of Rhys’ life, Short is convinced, the biographer not only raises her profile, but “simultaneously damages – perhaps irreversibly – that profile” (48). Biographical novels based on the lives of female literary figures like Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, too, reiterate this cultural myth of the tragic woman writer, at least in some cases, Short notices. In her subsequent comparative reading of Barron’s and Sellers’ as well as Moses’ and Tennant’s fictional approaches to Woolf and Plath, she shows that Barron and Tennant similarly emphasize the tragedy of these female authors’ lives by foregrounding, above all, their mental instability, and untimely deaths rather than their literary geniuses (48). In Moses’ and Sellers’ novels, however, the fragile mental state and deaths are alluded to but do not function as the focus of the novels (52). Instead, the two novels focus on the women’s creative work, “[building] their narratives around the understanding of these women as writers, as artists who were constantly engaged in a creative process, and who were permanently occupied with finding new ways to write and produce the work that was so vital to them” (Short 54-55, emphasis in original). This does not mean, Short notes, that the authors do not include these facts of their lives – the depression and suicide – in their narratives, but that they refuse to make them the central point of concern within their stories and thus to continue the same kind of narrative that has been told about them for decades (54-55). With their studies, these scholars confirm a most fundamental insight of feminist literary scholarship: “It is just not possible to say that women-centered writings have any necessary relationship to feminism,” as Rosalind Coward points out (57), that “[…] we cannot take ‘women’s writing’ to be a synonym for ‘feminist writing’,” as Mary Eagleton argues (191). Certainly, the very act of writing about women and thus about views and issues that have consistently been silenced and obscured by male-dominated historical discourse certainly is “an important anti-patriarchal strategy” (Moi 121), even “a kind of feminist resistance” (Kennedy 42). Yet, women’s stories can be represented in ways that are “alienating, deluded or degrading” which supports rather than chal- Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 57 lenges patriarchal and sexist assumptions (Moi 121). As I have shown, various scholars have raised awareness for the fact that even when biographical novels show a surface commitment to feminism in their centralization of previously marginalized historical women and their life stories, it should be interrogated closely by what representations of women and their lives they achieve their goal to ‘save’ women from historiographical neglect, to rewrite history from their perspectives, and/or how they reiterate or even reinforce the patriarchal agenda of the traditional historical narrative of her story. After all, it does not only matter that she is being represented and thus remembered: how she is being represented and remembered is just as politically important, as Kennedy claims (71). Thus, while it is a positive sign that women are gaining more presence in narratives of this kind, mere representation is not enough. While it is good that representations are increasing, they also need to improve since women often continue to be represented in problematic ways. The growing body of scholarship on herstorical biofiction shows that not every novel that deals with the life of a historical woman necessarily does so in the best interest of women, even if the respective writer clearly seems to be, or even overtly claims to be, motivated by the feminist ambition to reclaim the chosen subject from the marginality and/or misrepresentation she had to endure in traditional male-focused history. Thus, although female-oriented biographical novels can be called feminist in that they draw attention to hitherto often forgotten and neglected women and hopefully prioritize her story over his story, a woman-centered focus does not automatically go hand in hand with a progressive and positive portrayal of the chosen person and her life but at times is rooted very much in the patriarchal narrative it appears to critique. Against this background, shedding a critical feminist perspective on the stories that biographical novels create of women and their lives, as I intend to do in this study, seems to be a necessary and justified endeavor. 2.3 Approaching (Herstorical) Biofiction 2.3.1 Providing Gender-Sensitive Readings Taking my cue from the central premise of feminist literary theory, namely that not every novel written by and about as well as for women is automatically feminist, this study seeks to shed a critical feminist perspective on the images novels like those mentioned above create of the historical female scientists and their life stories. According to Lois Tyson, feminist criticism is concerned with “the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women” (283). Feminist critics thus read literary or media texts seeking to analyze when and how patriarchal ideology operates in the text at hand. The study of how literary and other kinds of texts perpetuate or challenge gendered stereotypes on the levels of both story (what is being represented) and discourse (how it is being represented) are among the earliest approaches to literature that were developed by feminist literary critics, Marion Gymnich explains (159). While the field has surely 58 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel diversified in the last couple of decades, such approaches to literary texts continue to be a vital part of the discussion in the arena of feminist literary criticism until today. Within the broad field of feminist (literary) criticism, the last few decades have also seen the emergence of approaches that critically examine questions of the gendered representation of life stories in narrative. These approaches, which refer to the factual genre of biography, can also be made fruitful for the genre of biographical fiction, as the explanations in the previous chapters and the various gender-oriented studies referenced therein have made clear. As I have shown, gender-sensitive approaches have been used to shed light on the gendered images and ideas present in biofictional writings and thus the gender-political messages sent by narratives of this kind to readers. Scholars in the field of feminist literary theory have long raised our awareness for the fact that all kinds of narrative are always closely interlinked with questions of gender. This certainly includes the narration of real lives as it happens in the genres of factual biography and biographical fiction. Caitríona Ní Dhúill emphasizes that gender questions always influence the writing and telling of life stories. She explains that “[e]very description of life is also the description of a life determined by gender, which is led within a changing cultural and social sex-gender system through the adoption, rejection or internalization of behavioral patterns determined by gender criteria” (“Brontës” 126, translation mine). Considering the ways in which historical women and their lives and scientific achievements are treated in contemporary herstorical biofictions, I adopt a gender-sensitive approach to biographical fiction. According to Ní Dhúill, gender-theoretical approaches [to life writing more generally and biography in particular] are concerned not just with the gender of biographers and biographical subjects, but with how biographers present their subjects as gendered, and what understandings of gender identity and difference underlie their portrayals. More fundamentally, a gender-aware approach to the genre raises the question of how human experience is lived and gendered through culturally available plots, and how these are reproduced in, and reinforced by, biographical narratives. (Metabiography 172) Adopting what Ní Dhúill writes about the intersections of biography/life writing and gender theory for the genre of herstorical biofiction, I seek to study the ways in which the chosen novels depict their chosen female subjects not only as determined by the gender conventions of their place and time but how gender influences the ways in which their stories have been and continue to be told in the present day. This also includes questions of how gender impacts the narrative choices that authors make regarding various textual elements on the levels of both story and discourse and what gendered messages the narrative choices made by the authors send to the reader about (these) women in the history of science and their life stories. 2.3.2 Considering the Chosen Subject’s Biography and Reception History To showcase the ways in which the novelists selected for this study reconstruct and recreate their chosen female subjects’ life stories by means of both historical fact and creative invention and imagination, I will rely upon biographical studies as well as Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 59 scholarly papers on the respective women by reading them alongside the novels. Each chapter will feature a longer passage that precedes the literary analysis in which I will consider the woman’s biography and her reception history. Here, I will relate her basic story as it is commonly known and will noticeably concentrate on those aspects that will become relevant in the context of my analysis. These passages, which come in the form of two or three subchapters preceding those parts dedicated to the study of the novel, are thus also highly selective and certainly make no claims to reflect the completeness and complexity of the individual woman’s life and her scientific legacy. Similar to other scholars working on the genre of biographical fiction or biofiction, above all Julia Novak in her numerous publications, I am convinced that knowing the historical facts about the given individual as far as they exist and/or are obtainable and reliable and being aware of the dominant cultural narrative of her story is important even imperative to analyze and assess the kind of (gendered) images and messages the literary texts at hand sent to their readers about (these) historical women in science. Writers of biographical fiction, as discussed in the previous sections, have certain fictional privileges when recreating the chosen life story in their novels. What I am especially curious about in this study are the narrative choices made possible by the fictional nature of the literary text at hand and the ways in which they impact the images created of the historical women, their life stories as well as their scientific accomplishments and abilities in the chosen biographical novels. All authors included here take quite a few artistic liberties when recounting the lives of historical female scientists within their biographical novels. The extent and way in which they fictionally supplement or even freely change the available historical facts about their protagonists’ lives differ, though. While some closely follow the existing biographical records using their narrative privileges only occasionally to provide some detail which have been lost in the historical records or to imagine their subjects’ interiority, others take more liberties with the material at hand making use of their poetic licenses not only for the invention of their protagonists’ often otherwise unavailable thoughts, feelings, and perceptions or to creatively imagine unrecorded private moments and personal conversations but to fictionally explore speculative but unprovable ‘truths’, and even to alter some of the established facts about their figures’ lives and times for their narrative purposes. To be able to recognize the ways in which authors of biofiction play with the record, one must have a certain degree of familiarity with the known facts about the woman’s life. Reading the biographical novel against the background of the chosen subject’s biography, I do not seek to compare the fictional representation with factual portrayals to evaluate the respective novel’s faithfulness to historical fact and/or biographical truth (if such a thing does even exist). To do so would be to clearly misunderstand and misinterpret the genre under discussion here. As Michael Lackey notes, the discourse of accuracy or fidelity is misleading because the intention of many biographical novelists is not to represent a historical life but to create a fictional story (“Locating and Defining” 7). He sees discussion surrounding the genre’s correctness or reliability as “a profoundly flawed view of biofiction,” indeed, “a faulty conception of the literary form” (Biofiction: 60 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel An Introduction 5). For Lackey, as well as for other scholars in the field of biofiction studies, fidelity to facts or historical-biographical accuracy is not a criterion for measuring the quality and/or the success of biographical fiction. He explains that “a biographical novel can be successful even if it fails to accurately represent the historical figure on whom the work is based” (Biofiction: An Introduction 5). I am familiarizing myself with the details of the women’s life and times to be able to see where the novelists chosen for this study use their poetic license in the biofictional retelling of her story. My goal here is to better understand and value the liberties taken, and to decode and evaluate their meaning against the background of the female subject’s biography. Fictional deviations from factual accounts, Martin Middeke argues, are “relevant, that is, symbolic” (3). It is precisely in these deviations from historical discourse, the additions, omissions, and/or changes made by the biographical novelists in the story of the life they represent in their literary works, that the authors’ ideological agenda becomes visible. The strategic modifications of historical-biographical facts “most disclose the writers’ objectives,” Lackey explains (“Uncanny Impact” 442). To see the deviations from the record and to be able to assess their function, perhaps also their necessity, and their meaning and value from a critical feminist perspective and in the context of the respective story and biography, one must have a certain degree of familiarity with the known, the lost, and the controversial facts of the subjects’ lives. Thus, when focusing on the changes, omissions, and emphases to the historical-biographical record, I am doing so to understand the gender-political positioning of the respective novel. In the scope of this study a particular focus will be placed upon the ways in which the novels interact with previous portrayals of these women in male-dominated discourse, which is why I am considering not only the chosen figure’s biography but her reception history as well. In addition to the question of how contemporary biographical fictions or biofictions represent historical women in science, their life stories, and their scientific abilities and achievements, I am asking myself in this study how these often avowedly feminist-motivated and so far solely female-authored novels engage with previous portrayals of the chosen women, their life stories, and their scientific aptitudes and accomplishments in male-centered historical-biographical discourse: Do they challenge and contradict the (often problematic) images and ideas that have dominated their stories so far? Or do they reproduce and repeat perhaps even reinforce these very images and ideas of her and her story? And how do they do it, that is by means of what narrative choices and decisions on the levels of both story and discourse? Not least the long lists of sources provided at the end of the novels clearly show that writers of biographical fiction or biofiction always interact with previous (usually factual) portrayals of their chosen subject. In doing so, they sometimes conform to, sometimes contest the dominant cultural narrative of her story (Cooper and Short 4). To see how the authors chosen for this study reproduce or repeat perhaps even reinforce certain stereotypes and myths, or where they challenge and perhaps even contradict them, it is necessary to be aware of the kind of ideas and images that have been created about the female subject, her life, and her scientific legacy in previous times and other narratives. To be able to determine Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 61 how the novels relate to previous portrayals, a familiarity with the dominant cultural narrative of the respective woman and her story is imperative. Therefore, in addition to the novel itself, biographies and other historical or metabiographical (if available) studies on the respective character will be included in the discussions of the novels. 2.3.3 Studying the Literary Texts and Its Paratexts In my study, I analyze the different levels of the literary text. This means that in addition to the level of action (histoire) and the level of narrative mediation (discourse), the contextual framework will also be considered in my analyses of the selected biographical novels about women in the history of science. Thus, apart from the biofictional text itself, in this case, the historical female scientist’s life story as presented in the book, this study will also consider the paratexts surrounding the respective literary narrative, for instance, the author’s notes or acknowledgments sections included in the novels, but also interviews with the individual writers, reviews by professional critics and sometimes amateur readers, and other accompanying materials that might be of interest in the context of the respective case study. That paratexts are important when seeking to understand a (literary) text is beyond dispute. Jonathan Gray, for instance, argues that paratexts are “part of the text” (230) and thus central, even imperative, to any study of a given text: [T]o ignore them and yet still feel comfortable about making a declaration regarding a text’s meaning, impact, power, effects, or value would be an act akin to reading only the third and fourth chapters of a book and feeling that this suffices for a full analysis. […] paratexts are as valuable a source of information about a text, and as important a site for the generation of text, as is the work itself. (230) In his work Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), which is an English translation of the original French publication entitled Seuils from 1987, literary theorist Gérard Genette introduces the notion of the paratext defining it as the materials supplied by authors, editors, and/or publishers, which frame, surround, and accompany the main text, e.g., the story itself of a (literary) work for the public. 13 He writes that (literary) texts are rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations. And although we do not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as belonging to the text, in any case they surround it and extend it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption in the form … of a book. (1, italics and omissions in original) 13 In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretations, Genette is mainly talking about literature in a narrow sense of the word. Other scholars have adopted his ideas for a broader understanding of literature, including media of all kinds. 62 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel According to Genette, paratexts are “those liminal devices and conventions both within the book (peritext) and outside it (epitext), that mediate the book to the reader” (xi, italics in original). He claims that “more than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold […]” (1-2, italics in original). Quoting French essayist Philippe Lejeune, he continues by saying that a paratext “is an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and outside, a zone without any hard or fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text), an edge, or, as Philippe Lejeune put it, ‘a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text’” (2). Genette differentiates between two kinds of paratexts: the ‘epitext’ and the ‘peritext’ (2). Peritexts are the elements which are placed “within the same volume” (Genette 4) and which are thus materially connected to the main text. Peritexts include, for instance, book covers, book jackets, promotional blurbs, book titles, author’s names, chapter headings, prefaces, introductions, legal disclaimers, dedications, footnotes, endnotes, images, illustrations, author’s profiles, bibliographies, table of contents, indexes, and what is variously referred to as acknowledgements, author’s notes, or afterwords. Epitexts are situated “at a more respectful (or more prudent) distance” of the volume (Genette 4). As epitexts Genette defines “all those messages, that, at least originally, are located outside the book, generally with the help of the media (interviews, conversations) or under cover of private communications (letters, diaries, and others)” (5). Among epitexts, which he also refers to as “distanced elements” (5), one might include not only interviews and conversations with the author, but, for instance, also reviews by critics or commercial texts written by publishers to promote the work, book readings and other promotional events, bestseller lists, and certainly also literary criticism. Paratexts then are the sum of epitexts and peritexts. Both kinds of paratext can be from the authors themselves or someone other than the author of the book. Situated on the brink between text and the reader, the function of the paratext is to mediate the respective text to the reader (Genette 5); they influence how texts are read and interpreted. Paratexts shape the messages sent and influence the meanings created by the main text; they have a strong impact on the reception of the story and its interpretation by the reader. Paratexts also play an important role in biographical fiction. While the number of studies which deal exclusively or even intensively with the paratextual elements of biographical novels is still very limited, 14 scholars of biographical fiction or biofiction seem to agree that paratexts are essential when studying works of this kind for they all refer to it and use it in their analyses even if they do not make it the central focus point. There are different reasons why studying the paratexts in addition to the narrative text itself is important to my approach to the chosen biographical fictions. As I have pointed out earlier in this study, in biofiction the paratexts reveal the hybrid nature of the genre under discus14 Bethany Layne’s 2018 paper “Biofiction and the Paratext: Troubling Claims to Truth” is the only example I came across in my research. Her focus is placed merely on authorial statements in appendices to biographical novels such as author’s notes, acknowledgements sections, or afterwords. Biographical Fiction, Female Life Stories and Feminist Efforts in Telling Herstory 63 sion, its status as products of both historical-biographical fact and creative invention and imagination. Authorial paratexts such as author’s notes, afterwords, or acknowledgements sections are often used by writers of the genre under discussion to comment on “the marriage of fact and fiction” (Layne, “Biofiction and the Paratext” 20) in their respective works. They become an important discursive space in which authors discuss the relationship between the biographical record of the chosen person’s life and the historical events and people surrounding their story as well as the artistic liberties the author took in recounting the respective life story in the novel. For reasons that might range from a mere wish of transparency and honesty towards readers to a strong desire of the reduction of accountability even a prevention of legal consequences such as libel action, authors of biographical novels oftentimes use the discursive space of the paratext to reveal the poetic license they have taken with the known facts of the chosen subject’s life story. At times they also use this space to justify and legitimize the artistic liberties taken. They give detailed explanations, for instance, regarding the availability of historical evidence and their authorial intentions. In their respective discussion of the relationship between novelistic freedom and historical-biographical facts as well as in the revelation of the liberties they have taken with the life at hand, one can also often see the author’s self-understanding as writers of fiction. The paratexts of biographical novels are not only of interest because they provide space for negotiations of historical, verifiable, accepted fact and creative invention and imagination and thus help the reader see what is true and what is made up by the author. There is another aspect, namely that of authorial or novelistic intent, which is also often expressed within paratexts, especially author’s notes or acknowledgements, sometimes also interviews or conversations with the writer that at times feature in the book itself. It is here that authors reveal their interest in the respective subject, the reasons why they chose to write about that person in the first place, and sometimes also what drives the biofictional account. Indeed, oftentimes, the paratext is an important site for novelists to discuss the motivation behind the writing of the respective biographical novel and “to clarify the nature of the relationship between the author and the subject” (Layne, “Biofiction and the Paratext” 19). In herstorical biofiction, paratexts function as vital spaces in which the authors express their “revisionist and often avowedly feminist aims” (Padmore and Gardiner 3). Many biographical novelists, those chosen for this study among them, use the paratextual elements to reveal to their readers the frequently decidedly feminist motivation behind the writing of the literary text at hand. It is here that they align themselves with previous research and the reception history of the person, where they disclose which literature they have read, whom they follow in their line of argumentation or whom they reject and thus where they situate themselves within the existing scholarly discourse surrounding women’s history in general and her life story in particular. The paratext is thus also an important discursive space for revealing the feminist aims of the novels. Given my focus on the ways in which the author’s motivations and intentions transfer into the story, paying close attention to the various paratextual elements surrounding the respective narrative, especially those written by the author herself, is central in the context of my study. 70 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel one of the leading scientists of her day: “Mary Anning’s knowledge of the subject is quite surprising – she is perfectly acquainted with the anatomy of her subjects and her disputes of Buckland, whose anatomical science she holds in great contempt, was quite amusing” (qtd. in Sharpe 70). In addition to common ‘curiosities’ like ammonites, belemnites, and cephalopods, among others, Anning had unearthed some “marvelously exotic creatures” (Pascoe 140) from the cliffs of the Blue Lias. The Blue Lias is a fossilrich area she was fortunate to be living in. Her most noteworthy findings are surely the first British ichthyosaurus (which she had spotted together with her brother Joseph), the first plesiosaurus (which Cuvier had accused her of having fabricated), and the first pterosaurs found outside of Germany (Davis 114-121). 20 Likewise significant but far less known are her discovery of the fish dapedius, the shark hybodus, and the primitive chimaera fish squaloraja polyspondyla as well as her revelation of the true nature of coprolites (which are fossil feces) and ink sacs in belemnites (Davis 114). Anning’s fossil discoveries were not only of a spectacular and in the eyes of her contemporaries also strange nature – many of the specimens unearthed by her were several feet long and unlike anything that people had ever seen before. They were also of enormous scientific value and historical significance. When Anning was unearthing these ancient (marine) reptiles, most people still believed that the earth had been created in six days and that it was merely a couple of thousands of years old; they were convinced that species never changed or died out, Shelley Emling points out (xi-xii). Not having any living counterparts or descendants, Anning’s findings questioned the biblical story of the creation of the world and humankind by an almighty deity and thus the whole foundation of the Christian faith “turning our knowledge of life on earth on its head” (Sharpe 9). Her findings also laid the groundwork for the concepts of extinction and evolution which Charles Darwin (1809-1882) would later explain in his famous work On the Origin of Species (1859) (Emling 209). Anning’s fossils “served as the building blocks of the nascent geological sciences” (Pascoe 140-141). Her discoveries, Mary Creese and Thomas Creese note, “formed an extremely important contribution to the emerging fossil record on which Buckland, Conybeare, Henry de la Beche and other great figures of the ‘golden age’ of British geology based their new theories” (28). Stephen Jay Gould is convinced that the beginnings of British paleontology owe more to Anning than to any of the men of science who had studied and written about the specimens that she had found (16). Davis says that “although she did not provide paleontology with great manuscripts to which later workers could refer, she did reveal, to the learned men of the time, important fossils, which played a key role in the growth of paleontology as a scientific endeavor” (121-122). Many of Anning’s most spectacular findings are on display in the British Museum of Natural History today. Sharpe points to the specimens’ ongoing significance when he notes that current researchers still use 20 Many credit only Mary Anning with having discovered the first British ichthyosaur. That it was her brother Joseph Anning who had spotted the skull first and shown where the rest of the body lay is a fact that has all too often been omitted from the historical narrative, as Davis explains (105-106, 115). Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 71 them (7). Despite the importance of her discoveries, it was not until the late twentieth century that her contributions were officially recognized, Davis explains (96). The iconic status Anning has gained within both the academic world and the wider cultural imagination is not only due to her impressive and original scientific accomplishments and the pivotal role she had played as “a fossil collector extraordinaire” (Pascoe 140) in the early days of nineteenth-century British geology and paleontology. Even more than her groundbreaking fossil discoveries, it seems to be the inspirational nature of her remarkable personal journey, her overcoming of the double odds of gender and class, which holds the contemporary fascination of scholars and laypersons alike. That she began hunting fossils at a very young age and discovered her first major specimen when she was still a child and that she is said to have survived a lightning strike as a baby further adds to the literary, almost mythical quality of her story. Anning certainly stands out among her (female) contemporaries – not only because of her exceptional expertise but even more so because of her working-class background. “Her achievements were remarkable by any standards,” writes Patricia Pierce in her biography of Anning, “but especially so because she was born and bred in lowly circumstances from which there was little chance of escape” (xii). Emling notes in her Anning biography that “it wasn’t so much Mary’s fossil finds that intrigued me, but rather it was how this low-ranking woman had managed to make an incredible mark in such a male-dominated field” (xiii). During the early nineteenth century, geology and paleontology were not yet professional scientific disciplines but largely “a private interest for people with sufficient money, time and leisure to study, travel and publish,” Martina Kölbl-Ebert explains (“British and German” 157). The number of women involved remained relatively small compared to men, yet, “in these informal, non-professional surroundings, women were welcomed – within the restrictions of the social order – as fellow enthusiasts, often working alongside husbands or brothers, and also for non-relatives” (Kölbl-Ebert, “British and German” 157-158). Though it was believed that women lacked not only the physical constitution but also the intellectual capabilities to partake in serious scientific study, male geologists and paleontologists welcomed them, above all, as assistants (Burek and Higgs 2) or “amanuenses” (Kölbl-Ebert, “Ladies with Hammers” 55). Indeed, one of the most common ways in which women participated in the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century geology and paleontology was by assisting the gentlemen scientists who had often encouraged and employed the female members of their respective families, usually their wives, to support them in their scientific endeavors (KölblEbert, “Ladies with Hammers” 55, Creese and Creese 25-26). Mary Buckland (née Morland) (1797-1857), Mary Ann Mantell (née Woodhouse) (1795-1869), Mary Elizabeth Lyell (née Horner) (1808-1873), and Charlotte Murchison (née Hugonin) (1788-1869) are some of the most famous “wife-assistants” (Creese and Creese 25) known to have contributed to their husband’s work (Creese and Creese 25-26, Davis 98-99). They had accompanied them on their fieldtrips and assisted them in the collecting of specimens, often taking over tasks like sketching, illustrating, writing, cataloguing, preparing publications, and sometimes making central observations of their own (Creese and Creese 72 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel 25-26, Davis 98-99). Davis highlights the importance of these women’s achievements when he states, “Sir Roderick Murchison, one of the best-known of early British geologists, would likely never have reached his position of prominence in geology without the introduction to rocks, minerals, and fossils by Charlotte” (99). The silent and invisible amateur work of women thus often formed the basis for the public work of men (McEwan 216). There were also women like Etheldred Benett of Wilshire (1776-1845), Elizabeth Philpot (1780-1857) and her two sisters Mary (1777-1838) and Margaret (1786-1845), Maria Graham (1785-1842), and Barbara Rawdon-Hastings, the Marchioness of Hastings (née Yelverton) (1810-1858) who had worked independently of men (Creese and Creese 26-31, Davis 99-100). Though barred from membership in the scientific societies of the day, they had presented their findings to the learned men and sometimes even published their own research (Creese and Creese 26-31, Davis 99-100). However, women’s forays into the world of science were only tolerated as long as their pursuits remained amateurish and domestic as the “public display of female creativity was beyond the invisible boundary of social conduct” (Kölbl-Ebert, “British and German” 162). While there were a few women engaged in geology and paleontology at the time who might have been accepted and appreciated by their fellow male scientists, Cynthia Burek and Bettie Higgs remind us that “society as a whole did not support the ambitions of women to follow their geological interests until the late 20th century” (2). Like the various men who engaged in geological and paleontological study at the time, women known to have participated in these endeavors usually came from influential and important families of the higher ranks of society, the landed gentry or aristocracy (Davis 98). Within such families “an interest in geology and the collection of specimens was considered a fashionable enterprise as well as an acceptable topic for discussions at dinner parties and other social events” (Davis 99, cf. Kölbl-Ebert, “British and German” 157-158). Anning, by contrast, could not rely on the asset of a privileged birth or an intellectually nurturing environment to ease her way into the male-dominated world of science. She was born and bred in very different socio-economic circumstances. Anning had been a poor working-class woman with little formal education who came from a family of religious non-conformists; they were Congregationalists, dissenters of the established Church of England. Thus, she had been socially handicapped in every possible way, Crispin Tickell suggests (321). Nevertheless, she enjoyed one major advantage, Emling is convinced: “the very good fortune of having been born in exactly the right place at the right time, in 1799 in an unassuming English town called Lyme Regis alongside some of the most geologically unstable coastline in the world” (xii). Anning had learned to find, obtain, and prepare fossils from her father, a carpenter and cabinetmaker by trade with a serious passion for these long-extinct creatures. Richard Anning (17661810) had often taken his daughter as well as his son, Joseph (1796-1849), Anning’s only surviving sibling, along when he went to the shore mining the beaches and cliffs of the popular seaside resort for curiosities (Torrens 257-258). To increase the impoverished family’s income, he sold these to tourists visiting town in the summer months (Torrens 257-258). After his sudden death, which left the family in debt and caused great Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 73 financial difficulties for them, Mary Anning, who was eleven years old at the time, continued the lonely and dangerous as well as unpredictable work of hunting for fossils on her own (Goodhue 28). She became very successful. Creese and Creese refer to her “as one of the most notable collectors of the early nineteenth century” (28). According to them, “for more than thirty years she functioned as one of the most skillful and expert field workers in the country” (28). For Anning, finding fossils was not a welcome pastime, as it was for most other people who engaged in such endeavors. It was the basis of her life, a means of survival for her family. Because hunting and selling fossils had been a source of income for her, many refer to Anning today as the first professional woman (vertebrate) paleontologist in history (Berta and Turner 18). Anning noted about herself once: “I am well known throughout the whole of Europe” (qtd. in Pascoe 162). She was not exaggerating. Locally, Anning had been famous since lightning had struck her as an infant which she had survived (Torrens 258). Her spectacular discoveries of ichthyosaurus, plesiosaurus, and pterosaurs made her an international celebrity. Not only curious tourists and wealthy amateur collectors but many of the prominent geologists of the day and founding fathers of paleontology such as William Buckland (1784-1856), Henry Thomas de la Beche (1796-1855), and William Conybeare (1787-1857) found their way to Lyme Regis (Emling 193). They sought to purchase her specimens or to accompany her upon the beach to learn how to find, unearth, and prepare fossils themselves (Emling 193). Despite her gender, social class, and limited education, “she confidently corresponded with some of the leading scientists in Europe” (Sharpe 7). Anning was evidently well-respected and well-trusted by the learned men of her time, many of whom she counted among her friends, for her talent in finding, excavating, and preparing these ‘remarkable creatures’ hidden in the Blue Lias formation of the English coast (Pierce 181, Davis 108). The endearing names they gave her show the admiration they had for her abilities and achievements: Ludwig Leichhardt (1813-1848) called her the ‘Princess of Paleontology’; Gideon Mantell (1790-1852) referred to her as ‘Geological Lioness’ (Davis 96). The high regard in which she was held becomes also perceptible in the funds they raised for her when, due to her worsening sickness (breast cancer), she was no longer able to hunt fossils (Torrens 269). It is likewise visible in the unprecedented obituary notice spoken by her friend and colleague, Anning’s “preeminent supporter” (Davis 110), de la Beche at the Geological Society upon her death: I cannot close this notice of our losses by death without adverting to that of one, who though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-saurians, and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis. Mary Anning was the daughter of Richard Anning, a cabinet-maker of that town, and was born in May, 1799. … From her father, who appears to have been the first to collect and sell fossils in that neighbourhood, she learnt to search for and obtain them. Her future life was dedicated to this pursuit, by which she gained her livelihood; and there are those among us in this room who know well how to appreciate the skill she employed (from her knowledge of the various works as they appeared on the subject), in developing the remains of the many fine skeletons of Ichthyo- 74 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel sauri and Plesiosauri, which without her care would never have presented to comparative anatomists in the uninjured form so desirable for their examinations. The talents and good conduct of Mary Anning made her many friends […]. (Qtd. in Davis 113, omission and italics in original) Though her fellow scientists had greatly admired her, there were some clear limitations to Anning’s involvement in the world of nineteenth-century science. As a woman and someone from the working classes, she faced double marginalization because of her gender and class. Anning was not only denied a formal (scientific) education; she could not attend university – neither could women from the higher classes for that matter. Devoid of any formal training, the official institutions of science of her time excluded her (Lanone 69). She was not eligible to become a member of the prestigious Geological Society of London (Berta and Turner 20), not to mention participate in their academic discussions or even attend their meetings (Sharpe 160). While upper-class women could join lectures, this was not possible for someone from the lower ranks of society like Anning (Davis 98). Men of science would sometimes acknowledge women from the higher classes like Bennet in their publications (Davis 99). Anning, however, rarely obtained credit for the discoveries she made (Davis 101, Pascoe 141). As it was common at the time, her fossil discoveries were usually named after and presented to the world by the geologists or private collectors who had bought the specimens from her (Torrens 280-281). While “these men made their scientific names, in part, by buying, naming, and displaying Anning’s finds” (Sheffield 74), she would come away empty-handed. Only Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) named two different species of fossil fish after her (Torrens 281-282). “Such acts of respect for women were unheard of among Mary’s British colleagues. Every one of her own finds had been named after men,” writes Emling (169). Formal recognition of her contributions remained non-existent until a couple of decades ago (Davis 96). According to her friend and fellow fossilist Anna Maria Pinney (1812-1861), the lack of proper acknowledgement and her exclusion from the scientific community as well as the fact that she would never have financial stability like her male counterparts increasingly embittered Anning later in life. “She says the world has used her ill... These men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages” (qtd. in Emling 150, omission in original). The gender and class bias that led to Anning never receiving the recognition she deserved throughout her life also influenced her posthumous memory. While Anning is today considered “a figure of enormous historical significance” (Torrens 279) and while her life and achievements are celebrated and commemorated in the various ways outlined above, she had long been pushed to the margins of the traditional narrative of the scientific past despite the originality and importance of her discoveries. All too often, writers of history have omitted her name from the discussions of her findings and have pushed her to the appendices and footnotes, Creese and Creese note (28). Gould describes Anning as “probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology” (100). He is certainly right in pointing out that Anning, like most women in (science) history, had never achieved the professional Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 75 recognition nor the historiographical consideration she would have deserved for her outstanding achievements. Pascoe underlines the unfair treatment Anning had experienced at the hands of the scientific community of her day, the lack of credit she received from her male peers, and her neglect by those in charge of writing the scientific past when she refers to her as “the Rosalind Franklin of paleontology” (141). She explains this comparison as follows: [j]ust as Franklin’s crystallographic portraits enabled James Watson and Francis Crick to deduce the double helical structure of DNA, so Anning’s fossil finds advanced the work of male scientists like Louis Agassiz and Gideon Mantell. And as Franklin’s work went uncelebrated when her male colleagues went on to win the Nobel Prize, so Anning’s contributions were, if not completely overlooked, only glancingly acknowledged. (141) Though late in coming, with the amount of academic and public attention that Anning’s life and accomplishments are receiving in the last couple of decades, not least thanks to a biographical novel like Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, she is finally getting the kind of appreciation and acknowledgement she would have merited and had longed for during her lifetime. 3.1.2 “A Mere Child Making Great Discoveries” 21 ? Mythologizing Her Story and Downplaying Her Abilities and Achievements While the narrative of science in the past might not have completely ignored her, Anning has “been strangely served both by history and by those writing about her,” Torrens points out (279). The image of Anning many of us have today is a highly mythologized one. This has to do with the fact that Anning had been so famous in her own lifetime that she had been subject to much mythmaking. Her contemporaries saw her as much as a curiosity as the creatures she unearthed, Torrens explains (277). Thanks to the enormous press-coverage that her fossil discoveries received, “Anning was literally a legend in her own lifetime,” Sharpe notes (156). The mythmaking about Anning also has to do with the lack of information about her life, as Pierce suggests: “[w]hen there are gaps in knowledge, the vacuum can be filled with myth, especially in reference to a woman, and an usual woman at that” (191). While present-day scholars do their best to separate legends from reality, even today some mystery still surrounds her story, Sharpe says (9). A prominent strand of the Anning myth is the lightning strike which has served many writers as “the ur-story” (Pascoe 147) of Anning, the epiphany-like moment in which her extraordinary and, in the eyes of her contemporaries, unusual abilities were born. Anning’s contemporaries saw her strange understanding of fossils, her outstanding skills in finding, unearthing, and preparing the remains of these prehistoric (marine) reptiles, as God-given. For them, there was apparently no other way to explain the existence of a young, impoverished, and largely unschooled working-class woman more competent in the field of fossils than most of the learned men in the country. Silvester had written in her diary in 1824, “[i]t is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour 21 Pierce 190. 76 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel – that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed” (qtd. in Sharpe 70). That Anning had miraculously survived a lightning strike as a baby came in very handy for those looking for a supernatural explanation of her intelligence and capabilities. The lightning strike to a tree had killed the woman holding her (a woman from her town, not her mother) and two girls standing next to her, but it had left Anning miraculously unharmed (Torrens 285). She apparently only needed a bath of warm water to revive (Torrens 285). The legend says that the lightning strike had transformed her from a sickly and rather dull baby to a bright and lively child, Torrens points out (285). The explanation of her aptitudes and achievements by means of “a seemingly miraculous intervention in the guise of a natural phenomenon,” one “comparable to the popular scientific version of the catalyzing lightning strike that sparks life on the planet,” as Cynthia Sugars suggests (212-213), is not favorable to the image of Anning. It neglects and ignores the hard work that Anning herself as well as those around her, including many of her fellow men and women in geology and paleontology, had given to her training. Her father had taught Anning the craft of finding and selling fossils, Davis explains (103, 114). The myth constructed around her “preternatural intelligence and perception” (Sugars 206) would prove difficult to deconstruct over the centuries, however. Until today, the myth of the lightning strike as the supposed origin of her extraordinary talent in locating and excavating fossils is still “a staple of her legend” (Heilmann 105). It is especially popular and prominent in the many juvenile biographies written about her, Pascoe notes (147). Another element of the Anning myth is the (over-)emphasis of the first ichthyosaurus she found when still a child. Studying the images historians, biographers, and writers of fiction have created of Anning throughout the last century and a half, Torrens notices “a strange, and to [him] sad, obsession with [her] earliest and infantile discoveries […] which ignores her much more significant later discoveries” (270). Resulting from the strong focus placed on her early, infantile discoveries then is a problematic “child-centred view of Mary Anning that [still] comes down to us today” (Torrens 276, italics in original). Torrens is convinced that the origins of this puerile image of Anning lie with Anning’s first biographer, her contemporary and fellow Lyme resident George Roberts (1803-1860). In his History of Lyme Regis published in 1834, Roberts had dealt extensively with Anning’s first major fossil finding, the ichthyosaurus discovered in 1811 and 1812 respectively, but had failed to notice the many subsequent specimens she unearthed from the cliffs of the Jurassic Coast in the years to come (Torrens 270). Later writers, relying (too much) on Roberts, have continued this emphasis on the fossil she detected in her preteen years and the omission of her more significant later findings, Torrens laments (270). Even today, the first ichthyosaurus she discovered “holds a key place in the Anning legend,” Pascoe observes (164). Pierce agrees when she notes, “Anning’s childhood discovery of the Ichthyosaurus probably outshone almost everything else she accomplished, although there was much more to come of geological and paleontological value” (190-191, italics in original). The representation of Anning as “a mere child making great discoveries” (Pierce 190) continues to live on especially in the various books about Anning published for children and young adults. That the last cou- Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 77 ple of decades saw the publication of many such books (Sharpe counts over thirty, 159) has certainly contributed to the fact that Anning’s cultural afterlife is still determined in significant ways by the image of her as “the ichthyosaur-discovering-twelve-year-oldgirl” (Pascoe 147). In the context of feminist efforts to provide girls with positive female role models, many women in the history of science have advanced to heroines for children and young adults. Studies testify to the need and the impact of endeavors like these (see for example Owens). Anning seems to be particularly suitable here, for she began to work as a fossilist and surely made some of her most spectacular discoveries when she was still a child. She might thus be a very relatable character for a young target group. Her strong presence in literature for the youngest members of society is certainly welcoming from the perspective of popularizing her story not only among children but also their parents who might in many cases be the ones purchasing and, depending on the child’s age, the ones reading the stories to them. The “Anning child tale” (Sharpe 159) also raises a couple of issues, however. Within such narratives, her story is often presented in “oversimplified and romanticized” ways, Richard Ellis notes, the “uplifting Victorian tale of a young girl who discovered a ‘crocodile’ in the cliffs of Lyme Regis and sold it to an understanding gentleman just in time to save her family from the poorhouse” (69). While it does make sense to focus on Anning’s early life in books aimed at a young audience, this child-centered view is problematic in representations of Anning for an adult readeror viewership. Infantilizing women in science in the sense of treating and thus perceiving grown women as if they were “persons in need of protection, who need to be taken care of” is a still popular strategy used in depictions of female scientists, as Kerstin Bergman has shown in her study on representations of women in science (324). While in Bergman’s sample of crime fiction with fictional characters, this gender-stereotypical infantilization of women does not necessarily serve the purpose of downplaying female expertise and experience in the male world of science, this problem clearly emerges in depictions of Anning, both past and sometimes present. Quoting a comical rhyme written by J.W. Preston in 1884, Pierce notes how the child-centered image of Anning often went hand in hand with a trivialization and downplaying of her abilities and achievements: Miss Anning, as a child, ne’er passed A pin upon the ground But picked it up and so at last An Ichthyosaurus found. (Qtd. in Pierce 192) The strong focus placed on Anning’s juvenile achievements risks overshadowing her later achievements, and the importance and significance of her in science history, Sharpe says (159). This is especially problematic when considering that scholars are still disputing Anning’s scientific legacy. Though historical evidence shows that Anning had been more than a mere hunter and seller of fossils, many still reduce her to these roles. What is sometimes still overlooked is that she was also a careful scientist who studied the fossils she unearthed and who made important observations about them which many 78 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel of the learned men of her time relied upon in their studies. She might thus be considered a scientist like any of the gentlemen she interacted with. Nevertheless, oftentimes we still find problematic presentations of her. In his work on the history of geology Bursting the Limits of Time (2005), paleontologist and historian of science Martin Rudwick gives the following assessment of Anning’s achievements and abilities: [A] woman of low social class and little education could become famous for her own collecting activities and make a modest living from such work: Mary Anning of Lyme Regis in southern England was celebrated among a later generation of savants for her skill in discovering the finest specimens of fossil reptiles, though she did not have the expertise to interpret them scientifically. (Limits of Time 35) In his 2016 publication Earth’s Deep History, he repeats this claim. He acknowledges that Anning had “an exceptionally sharp ‘eye’ or flair for finding fine fossils” (Deep History 138). However, he denies her any aptitudes that would go beyond that when he states that “modern heroic myth-making about her has obscured the fact that this enviable gift was, and is, rarely combined with the skills and knowledge needed to interpret the fossils scientifically once they were found” (Deep History 138). Anning scholars do not agree with such narrow and reductive evaluations of her competencies and contributions. It is true to say that Anning’s contributions to the history of geology and paleontology were mainly those of a “collector and seller” of fossils (Davis 101). While seeking and vending fossils was her primary occupation and she eventually opened her own fossil shop at the age of twenty-seven (Davis 106), she was more than a diligent and able fossil hunter and dealer. Glendening points out that Anning’s skills went far beyond “excavating, cleaning, assembling, mounting, and drawing” fossils: she also made “interferences about the character and lives of the creatures they represented” (32). According to Torrens, she was “both discoverer and creator” (270). Anning did not write and publish scientific papers on her own (Pierce 192, Davis 121-122). As a woman, a member of the working classes, and someone without any formal education, the scientific community of her time would also not have seen her as qualified to do so, Pierce reminds us (190). Her exclusion from official, written scientific discourse did not mean that she did not show any intellectual interest in her discoveries, however. According to Creese and Creese, Anning “was quite aware of the significance and importance of the specimens she was discovering” (29). She had worked hard to understand the meaning of her findings. Over the years and with the help of the men and women in science she knew, she developed a scientific understanding of the fossils she unearthed. According to Sharpe, her knowledge of fossils was “at least the equal of her academic male colleagues at Oxford and Cambridge” (42). Davis points out that she was familiar with the scientific literature of her day having transcribed many papers for her own private library (105). She even taught herself French to be able to read the works of Cuvier (Davis 105). While some still refer to her as having been illiterate, her surviving correspondence and journals clearly prove that she was “highly articulate and more than capable of expressing her thoughts and opinions in writing” (Noè et al. 369). Davis even attests her a “clear and direct style, which is relatively free of spelling and grammatical errors” (105). Pre- Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 79 sent-day scholars have suggested that Anning had entertained the wish to partake in scholarly thought herself. As evidence of her academic ambitions, they have referred to a comment she had apparently once made at the bottom of a paper transcribed from William Conybeare: annoyed by his many long prefaces, she wrote down that “when I write a paper there shall be but one preface” (qtd. in Sharpe 123). With her own scientific paper beyond reach, what Anning did contribute, however, are careful anatomical sketches and illustrations as well as important observations that many of the famous scientific men of the day relied upon in their own works and publications (Berta and Turner 18). Her drawings show “a sure grasp of scientific method” (Lanone 70). Sharpe credits Anning with an “expertise in preparing her specimens” that was matched by “her knowledge and understanding of their [the fossils] anatomy” (7). Such assessments are also made by others (see for example Pierce 195, Pascoe 152; Turner, Burek, and Moody 116). Thus, it is certainly correct to say that Anning, not least due to her classand gender-related limited access to formal education, had pursued “a practical, hands-on kind of learning and research” (Pierce 18). Her approach to fossils was more intuitive and instinctual than book-learned. However, it was no less valuable for that, and it was greatly cherished by the scientific men and women of her time. 3.1.3 “How Can a Twenty-Five-Year-Old Middle-Class Lady Think of Friendship with a Young Working Girl?” 22 Chevalier’s Relational Approach to Her Story Retelling a period of about twenty years in Anning’s sparsely-recorded life and revealing some of her long-neglected accomplishments, Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures forms part of the various attempts undertaken in recent years to save Anning from the “historical near-extinction” (Glendening 56) she had been victim to for much of the past. Unlike the other authors selected for this study, Chevalier abstains from stating the feminist motivation underlying her fictional account of Anning’s story in form of a comment in the afterword or author’s note, here postscript. Nevertheless, her revisionist agenda becomes perceptible in her critique of the lack of proper acknowledgement that Anning experienced during her lifetime as well as the consequent erasure from the scientific records and historiographical discourse she would continue to face long beyond that. In the novel, Chevalier dramatizes this critique in a fictitious scene. Mary’s friend Elizabeth secretly attends a meeting of the Geological Society at which some of the leading scientists of the day discuss one of Mary’s findings, the plesiosaurus. Elizabeth hides on the landing of the stairs, so that the members attending the meeting will not see her, as her gender does not permit her to sit in the room with the male geologists and paleontologists. From there, she overhears the following words spoken about her companion and colleague by the institution’s incoming president, William Buckland: ‘I should just like to express my thanks to Miss Anning,’ he said, ‘who discovered and extracted this magnificent specimen. It is a shame it did not arrive in time for this illustrious and enlightening talk by Reverend Conybeare, but once it is installed here, Mem22 Chevalier 31. 86 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel was no one I wanted to impress with my femininity” (Chevalier 26, italics mine). By means of the featured discussions between Elizabeth and Lord Henley, the novel shows that fossils were indeed “an acceptable topic for discussions at dinner parties and other social events” (Davis 99) of polite society. However, most non-scientific characters in the novel, including her own sisters, are rather disinterested if not outright disgusted with Elizabeth’s increasing obsession with fossils, which clearly emphasizes the particularity of her chosen pastime in terms of traditional gender role expectations. For members of the working classes hunting and selling fossils was an unusual occupation, too, and Mary is clearly presented as an outcast. The novel highlights the unusualness of her interest in fossils when comparing Mary with her working-class friend Fanny Miller, who is afraid of fossils though she too has the ‘eye’ for locating them. While being “the lightning girl” (Chevalier 33) makes Mary exceptional in the eyes of her society, not only the family's religious orientation, but the father’s side income of fossil hunting further marginalizes the already socially disadvantaged family, which lives tellingly “at the bottom of the town” (Chevalier 27). Mary knows that “[o]ur family weren’t popular in Lyme, for people thought Pa’s interest in fossils odd. Even Mam did, though she would defend him if she heard talk about him at the Shambles or outside Chapel” (Chevalier 64). That her father goes hunting fossils on Sundays during Church services further scandalizes the family in the eyes of their community. Mary and Elizabeth pursue the activity of fossil hunting and collecting on the beaches of Lyme Regis empowered by their uncommon friendship. Elizabeth’s interest in the friendship and collaboration with Mary is not altruistic in nature. Since the beach “was not considered a place for a lady to be out on her own, not even by independent Lyme standards” (Chevalier 38), she greatly values the company of a “kindred spirit” (Woods). In the lonely occupation of fossil hunting, Mary’s “presence near by, bent over the ground, scrabbling in the mud or splitting open rocks, [is] a familiar comfort” to her (Chevalier 266). She also appreciates her familiarity with the local surroundings and the feeling of security that she provides her with: […] though I didn’t tell her, I was more at ease when she was with me, for I worried about the tide cutting me off. Mary had no fear of that, for she had a natural feel for the tides that I never really learned. […] While I consulted tide tables in our almanac before going out on the beach, Mary always knew what the tide was doing, coming in or going out, any given time. (Chevalier 37-38) In a way, Mary is also a teacher for Elizabeth as Elizabeth learns valuable lessons from Mary. For instance, “how the sea sorts stones of similar sizes into bands along the shore, and which band you might find what fossils in; how to spot vertical cracks in the cliff face that warn of a possible landslip; where to access the cliff walks we could use if the tide did cut us off” (Chevalier 38). Though she has some initial reservations about “the idea of a child teaching [her] how to do something” (Chevalier 37), she comes to appreciate her young companion’s expertise in finding fossils. While for Elizabeth, their relationship means companionship and the securing of appropriateness, for Mary the relationship to Elizabeth opens the world of science to her. When Elizabeth meets her, Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 87 Mary is a curious, illiterate child with a ‘sharp eye’ and self-taught, experience-based knowledge of fossils. Elizabeth encourages her companion to learn how to read and write at Sunday school. She also introduces her to scientific knowledge, and it is through her that Mary gains access to academic literature for the first time, any literature at all for that matter, apart from the Bible. Elizabeth also teaches her the methods of a scholar: “Don’t forget to write down where you found it, which layer of rock and the date. It is important to record it,” she reminds Mary (Chevalier 68). It is through Elizabeth that Mary comes to know the scientific theories surrounding the fossils they unearth. When Mary finds her first ichthyosaurus, Elizabeth lends the family money so they can hire local quarrymen to extract the fossil, as Mary and her brother are not able to do so on their own given the enormous size of the specimen. She reassures her to continue the fossil business on her own after her father’s death when her brother Joseph chooses the more stable indoor life of an upholsterer ensuring her that she is more than capable of hunting on her own. For Mary, Elizabeth also facilitates her encounters with the leading geologists and paleontologists and wealthy fossil collectors who, shortly after her first major discovery, the ichthyosaurus, come to Lyme Regis a-flocking and clamor to meet her in person: “I had never been in the company of educated gentlemen. Sometimes Miss Elizabeth come with us, and that made it easier for me, for she was older and of their class, and could go between as needed” (Chevalier 139). Both Mary and Elizabeth try to find their place in science and society, a place in between society’s expectations of women and their personal liberation, and Chevalier suggests that their friendship helps them carve out a space for themselves in this male-dominated world of early nineteenth-century science. Their relationship functions as a kind of sanctuary for both women, a safe space that offers them a possibility for intellectual exchange, emotional and moral support, and guidance. With Remarkable Creatures, Chevalier does not only challenge the still prevailing popular perception that female scientists, if they existed at all in earlier centuries, were unique exceptions to the rule, “lonely heroines,” to borrow Eva Flicker’s term here (315-316), who were surrounded only by men and who had to ‘make it on their own.’ By portraying another woman as the one guiding the heroine through the various challenges she faces venturing into the male-dominated world of early nineteenth-century science, Chevalier also emphasizes a vital part of the female experience in science history. I mean the kind of sisterly support and solidarity that scientifically inclined women had provided for each other in view of male opposition and gender-based restrictions, the networks, and communities they had built to support one another intellectually, emotionally, and morally, which is a long-hidden aspect in the history of women in science only coming to light in recent years. Studies like Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am’s Creative Couples in the Sciences (1996) or Annette Lykknes, Donald L. Opitz, and Brigitte Van Tiggelen’s For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences (2012) have closely analyzed the ways in which relationships to men, especially marital research collaborations, have offered women avenues into the sciences. However, so far, scholars have not explored in any detailed manner the alliances that scientifically inclined women had provided for 88 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel each other throughout the past. One possible explanation for this is that patriarchal culture has long devalued and trivialized female relationships; it was a long-dominant belief that women did simply not possess the ability to form rich and meaningful connections with each other. Throughout history, “friendship has been a male preserve,” Joan Chittister notes (xiv). By consequence, scholarly attention had long concentrated on relationships among men. In recent years, spurred on by a new feminist-motivated interest in women’s lives and the female experience of the past as well as an emphasis on the concept of sisterhood, academics have begun to reveal the close and powerful bonds that women had formed with each other. With studies like Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (2014) by Amanda E. Herbert or The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship (2015) by Marilyn Yalom and Theresa Donovan Brown, they have begun to reestablish the significance and vitality of women’s friendships and communities at various points throughout history. Focusing on the bond between two women, Remarkable Creatures emphasizes female friendship and the kind of support women provided for each other to subsist and succeed in the male(-connoted) world of science in previous centuries. In doing so, the author revalues women’s relationships as an important aspect of the female experience of the scientific past. Furthermore, the pairing of the two women’s stories allows Chevalier to highlight the remarkability and exceptionality of Anning’s story in the context of the history of (women in) nineteenth-century geology and paleontology. Elizabeth might be seen as a contrasting figure through which the novel emphasizes Mary’s incredible personal journey, the ways in which she struggled and succeeded against the double odds of gender and class and the educational and economic limitations and disadvantages these entailed. Chevalier’s narrative text traces the two historic women’s contributions to the developing fields of geology and paleontology without omitting the obstacles and barriers they encountered in a society based upon patriarchal ideology and a scientific community that understood itself as “a world without women” (Noble). Through the novel’s focus on Elizabeth’s association with and support of her, it becomes clear that Mary was doubly disadvantaged in the world of early nineteenth-century science: by her gender and her social status. While both women suffer under the oppression of patriarchy, the novel is keen to portray the class-related differences that mark the women’s gendered experiences in Regency England. These become apparent for instance in the very different motivations and prerequisites they have for engaging with fossils. In the absence of a husband and children, upper-middle class lady Elizabeth hunts and collects fossils as a pastime to fill her days in the small town of Lyme Regis with its restricted social life: “it is so tedious being a lady sometimes,” she notes (Chevalier 26). While Mary shares Elizabeth’s interest in fossils, to her fossil hunting and collecting is not “a peculiar pleasure” (Chevalier 26) but a means of survival. Mary’s lower-class family depends on her fossil findings for their living. Unlike Elizabeth, she does not keep them but must sell them to tourists and scientists to supplement the family’s income and, after the sudden death of her father, save them from the workhouse. Over time, Elizabeth develops an academic interest in the fossils, much to the dismay of her sisters, her family, and Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 89 wider society. She has access to research literature and a lot of time to devote to the study of specimens. Mary, by contrast, because of her social standing, has a purely economic motivation to hunt fossils. To her, “a good specimen […] meant a good price” (Chevalier 36). She does not have the time to study them; nor would she have access to literature and scientific knowledge without Elizabeth. The class-specific differences between the protagonists also manifest in the unalike experiences they make with the maleand middle-class-dominated science system. Elizabeth is clearly constrained by gender limitations. However, compared to Mary, she enjoys certain privileges due to her social class and educational background. She grows up in an intellectually nurturing environment, she has access to a cultural life. Chevalier shows that Elizabeth’s upper middleclass background gained her more acceptance and respect by the scientific men of the day. In a conversation with Elizabeth’s brother, Buckland openly admires and acknowledges her abilities: “‘Did you know, sir, that your sister knows more about fossil fish than just about anyone? What a clever creature she is. Even Cuvier could learn from her!’” (Chevalier 226). As long as her ambitions remain amateurish, she is welcomed as a fellow enthusiast. While her knowledge of fossils is substantial and often exceeding that of the men, as a woman she also faces belittlement: “What a clever little lady you are,” notes Henley dismissively in a conversation with her about fossils (Chevalier 44). Her participation has clear limitations. As a woman she does not really belong, but is confined to her home and to the role of passive observer of men’s scientific explorations: We label the specimens, recording where and when we found them, and display them in cases with glass tops. We study them and compare specimens, and we draw conclusions. The men write up their theories and publish them in journals, which I read but may not contribute to myself. (Chevalier 116) Elizabeth realizes the territorial discrimination of women in the male-dominated world of science when she tries to enter the building of the Geological Society in London and is denied access by the doorman: “‘Women are not allowed in the Society,’ he replied, not even glancing at me” (Chevalier 295). It becomes clear that Mary, although she is the clearly more talented fossil hunter, has a much harder time gaining a foothold in the world of science. While Elizabeth enjoys some kind of acknowledgement and is easier going with the various men of science who are of her own class and who seemingly accept her, Mary is prohibited from partaking in any scholarly discussion even though her knowledge of fossils outclasses that of all. “Learned men were discussing it at meetings and writing about it, and Mary was excluded from their activity. She was relied upon to find the specimens, but not to take part in studying them,” Elizabeth notes (Chevalier 181). Mary soon finds herself in the rather odd situation of leading male geologists and paleontologists along the beach teaching them how to look for and excavate fossils. While scientists come to her to learn from her and join her in searching for fossils, she is clearly an outcast because of her working-class background and her lack of formal education: “They treated me as little more than a knowledgeable servant” (Chevalier 181). Mary does not seem unhappy about this, however, but rather welcomes it, as it “was a part [she] could play easily enough” (Chevalier 139) which hints at her 90 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel working-class background. The class-related differences in the treatment and perception of the two women also emerges in the behavior that the scientists show them, for instance in the recognition they give for their scientific achievements. Elizabeth’s fossil which she donates to the museum is correctly referred to as found by Philpot, even if the question of her sex is neatly sidestepped through the omission of her first name as a marker of her female identity. By contrast, Mary’s fossil is credited to the man who bought it from her. Linking the life stories of Mary and Elizabeth allows the author to point to both the sexism and the classism of the social and scientific system of the time. Through its focus on women from different socio-economic backgrounds, Remarkable Creatures illuminates how multiple forms of oppression intersect with one another. Thus, by means of its relational approach, Remarkable Creatures sheds light on a littleknown aspect of Anning’s biography and emphasizes her remarkability and exceptionality in the context of the history of women in science. However, the image the novel creates of Anning by means of this female-centered relational approach is familiar and corresponds to the stereotypical representation of her life in other accounts, as I will show now. 3.1.4 “[Are] You the Lightning Girl?” 26 Perpetuating the ‘Anning Child Tale’ As I have pointed out earlier in this chapter, writers past and present have often attached a mythic quality to Anning’s story, one strand deriving from the lightning strike Anning had survived as an infant and the other from her first major discovery, the ichthyosaurus she had found when still a child. Remarkable Creatures features the event of the lightning strike or rather Mary’s supposed memory thereof in what appears to be a kind of prologue for the story: Lightning has struck me all my life. Just once was it real. I shouldn’t remember it, for I was little more than a baby. But I do remember it. […] The lightning killed the woman next to me and two others, but I survived […] They say I was a quiet, sickly child before the storm, but after it grew up lively and alert. I cannot say if they are right, but the memory of that lightning still runs through me like a shiver. It marks powerful moments in my life. (Chevalier 9-10) Analogous to Elizabeth’s leitmotif mentioned earlier, the lightning functions as a leitmotif for Mary. Each time she finds a key fossil, she remembers the lightning, turning back to the beginning of her life and this story (she also feels it in other powerful moments, for instance, when she falls in love or when she reunites with Elizabeth after their falling-out). Mary believes that she owes her singular gift, her ‘eye’ for finding fossils, to the lightning strike that she survived as a baby – so does her mother: “My Mary always finds things. She’s special like that – always has been, since she was struck by lightning” (Chevalier 104). While especially the lower-class people in the novel believe in the connection between the lightning strike and Mary’s talent, Chevalier’s Mary does not rely on divine providence for her scientific abilities and unique knowledge of fossils 26 Chevalier 33. Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 91 though. The novel suggests that in addition to a natural intelligence and curiosity she possess, it had been the careful training by her father, which had enabled her to become “the greatest fossilist the world ever knew” (Torrens 257). As Mary points out: I don’t remember there ever being a time when I weren’t out upon beach. […] I was always looking for curies, for as long as I can recall. Pa took me out and showed me where to look, said what they were – verteberries, Devil’s toe nails, St Hilda’s snakes, bezoars, thunderbolts, sea lilies. Before long I could hunt on my own. (Chevalier 59-60) Given its focus on Mary’s coming-of-age, her move from childhood to adulthood, Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures contributes to the perpetuation of the child-centered view of Anning noted earlier. Remarkable Creatures is directed to an adult (female) readership, something that might be guessed from the novel’s make-up and marketing. However, it, too, focuses merely on Anning’s early life and her juvenile discoveries. Like other Anning stories, for instance, Thomas’ biographical novel or the many children’s and young adults’ books written about her, it excludes everything that came thereafter. Anning’s interesting and tragic later years are relegated to a couple of concluding sentences in the postscript. The important fossil discoveries she made later, most significantly perhaps her detection of the true nature of coprolites and ink sacs in belemnites (Davis 114), are not even mentioned here. Chevalier hints at the different roles that Mary performed, that she was not only a hunter of fossils but also grew into a buyer and dealer of fossils. The postscript alludes to the Fossil Depot she opened. However, due its narrow timeframe, Chevalier does not show her as the “consummate business woman,” the “ultimate professional” (Torrens 279, 283) she eventually became and thus prevents her readership from gaining a complete picture of her life, her scientific acumen, and her many achievements. Though Chevalier lets her readers see only part of her scientific legacy, she leaves no doubt about her competencies as a fossilist and the importance of her contributions. The novel has several characters express their admiration of Mary’s aptitudes and achievements. Elizabeth says the following words about her friend and colleague, words that while acknowledging her skills are also pointing to the limited recognition she received: Mary had been so generous for so long, to so little gain […] while others took what she found and made their names from it as natural philosophers. William Buckland lectured on the creatures at Oxford, Charles Konig brought them into the British Museum to acclaim, Reverend Conybeare and even our dear Henry de la Beche addressed the Geological Society and published papers about them. Konig had had the privilege of naming the ichthyosaurus, and Conybeare the plesiosaurus. Neither would have had anything to name without Mary. […] she outstripped them all in her abilities. (Chevalier 285) Colonel Birch is another figure in the novel who voices his respect of Mary’s talents: I met many people who professed to know a great deal about fossils: what they are, how they came to be here, what they mean. But none of them knows even half of what you understand. […] Your knowledge may be self-taught and come from experience rather than from books, but it is no less valuable for that. You have spent a great deal of time with specimens; you have studied their anatomies and seen their variations and subtleties. 92 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel You recognise the uniqueness of the ichthyosaurus, for example, that it is not like anything we have ever imagined. (Chevalier 257-258) The novel highlights the superiority of Anning’s self-taught and experience-based knowledge of fossils when it shows Mary teaching the educated gentlemen scientists who come to Lyme Regis in flocks once news spreads of her first ichthyosaurus find (which is then still believed to be a crocodile). The men come to her for help in finding and identifying fossils on the beaches of Lyme Regis. Soon, Mary finds herself “in the company of the geologists and other interested gentlemen” (Chevalier 139) leading them on fossils hunts along the beaches of Lyme Regis: “All day they come up with wouldbe curies for me to judge. Soon others caught on, and I was called here and there to tell the men what they had or hadn’t found. Then they would ask me where they should look, and before long I was leading them on fossil hunts along the beach” (Chevalier 139). The men’s scientific methods, all their “measuring, peering through magnifying glasses, taking notes, and making sketches” (Chevalier 138) are not only highly amusing for Mary but also shown as ineffective and unsuccessful: “For all the fuss made, not one found a complete croc. A cry would go up from someone, and others would hurry over to look, and it would be nothing, or just a tooth or a bit of jaw or a verteberry – if they were lucky” (Chevalier 138). Even if not asked, Mary speaks up to the men of science, correcting their mistakes and explaining the fossils’ different shapes and textures and her methods for locating them. Here, it becomes evident how she rises from a mere hunter and seller to an expert sought out by many. The novel clearly acknowledges her experience and expertise as a fossil hunter, that despite the lack of any formal scientific education she developed a high proficiency in her field, which distinguishes her from the male geologists and paleontologists she engages with. By consequence of the narrow focus of her novel, Chevalier, however, excludes other aspects of her achievements and abilities. While the novel shows that with the help of Elizabeth, she learns to read and write at Sunday school, the fact that she taught herself French to read the works of Cuvier does not feature in the novel. Mary is curious about her findings and eager to learn more about them asking Elizabeth and sometimes the male scientists whom she encounters what they make of the creatures she unearths. However, the ways in which Anning had copied out scientific and religious texts and tried hard to follow the constantly shifting theories of pre-Darwinian society about fossils and their meaning, how she tried to keep up with the debates and questions triggered by her fossils, receive little attention in the novel. The only hint we have is when Elizabeth stumbles upon “a sheaf of papers in Mary’s hand” and discovers “there were twenty-nine pages of text, as well as eight pages of illustrations, all of which Mary had painstakingly copied out” (Chevalier 276). She reports to the reader: I flipped to the end to read the conclusion, and there discovered a note in small writing at the bottom of the last page. It read: ‘When I write a paper there shall not be but one preface.’ It appeared Mary felt confident enough to criticise Reverend Conybeare’s wordiness. Moreover, she had plans to write her own scientific paper. Her boldness made me smile. (Chevalier 276) Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 93 The reader never sees Mary working on these papers, however. We never witness her intellect at work, how she developed her own ideas about the remarkable creatures she unearthed or what she thought about the scientific literature she was reading, and the role she played in the men’s world of science. However, we see her growing love of fossils, which goes well beyond them being a source of income for her and her family: “fossils were more than money to me now – they had become a kind of life, a whole stone world that I were a part of. Sometimes I even thought about my own body after my death, and it turning to stone thousands of years later. What would someone make of me if they dug me up?” (Chevalier 333). The child-like image of Anning emerging from Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures is further reinforced by the ways in which Mary is presented as being in constant need of protection by Elizabeth. One scene is particularly striking here and that is when Mary is buried in a landslide and Elizabeth is the one who comes to her rescue digging her up with her own hands (Chevalier 172). While a landslide had buried Anning once, that Philpot had saved her is not born out of the historical evidence but Chevalier’s own making here (for the actual historical event see, for instance, Emling 162-163). The rescue from the physical danger inherent to the fossil business comes along with a couple of professional rescues, which include the securing of adequate payment, the reclaiming of her achievements and abilities from male appropriation, and the safeguarding of her reputation. The first fossil that is unearthed by Mary raises the interest of Lord Henley who purchases the specimen from the family. The fossil impresses him, yet he is not willing to acknowledge the role of a young working-class girl in its discovery. Elizabeth notes that “Lord Henley cared nothing about what Mary thought. Indeed, he hardly noticed her, instead making a show of examining the skull with a magnifying glass he brought with him” (Chevalier 100). His disregard for Mary’s work culminates in his omission of her name in the museum in London to which he sells the specimen for considerable profit. When visiting the city and the museum with her family, Elizabeth comes across the fossil and sees the label which names Lord Henley as the finder. Shocked not only by the appearance of the crocodile (the fact that the specimen is an extinct dinosaur had yet to be discovered), but also by Lord Henley’s appropriation of Mary’s creature, Elizabeth, in her role as Mary’s advocate and mentor, confronts him with her puzzlement over the named finder of the fossil. In the explanation Henley provides, Mary’s double disadvantages emerge once again: “Mary Anning is a worker. She found the crocodile on my land […]. Besides which, Mary Anning is a female. She is a spare part. I have to represent her” (Chevalier 125). By means of Lord Henley’s appropriation of Mary’s first major finding, the novel thematizes the ways in which men have often not recognized and sometimes even plagiarized female contributions, how women’s contributions have been erased from the scientific and historical records through acts of appropriation by men. Colonel Birch, another male scientist we encounter in the story, does not only rob Mary of her findings, including an ichthyosaurus, by seducing her into working for him without pay, but also denies her any power of observation. Condescendingly, he says to a female friend of his, “Ladies are not equipped to 94 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel look at such things [fossils] as carefully as men” (Chevalier 215). The comment reiterates essentialist discourses that intend to rationalize the exclusion of women from the study and practice of science with their different biology, their inferior female nature, something we sometimes still encounter when it comes to explaining the underrepresentation of women in STEM. Again, Elizabeth takes decisive action and intervenes unasked by speaking up on Mary’s behalf and demanding payment for Mary and her family, which she eventually obtains. The final finding portrayed in the novel constitutes a professional crisis for Mary. The French naturalist George Cuvier questions her scientific competence and doubts her integrity by wrongly accusing her of fraud, of combining two different specimens in one, in a patronizing letter in which his assistant writes: “Baron Cuvier […] is of the opinion that you have joined together two separate individuals […]. In future, Mademoiselle, perhaps your family might take more care when collecting and presenting specimens” (Chevalier 281). Cuvier’s criticism of Mary’s work shows not only the workings of patriarchy, how male ideas were the only legitimate ones: “Baron Cuvier holds the view that the structure of the reported plesiosaurus deviates from some of the anatomical laws he has established” (Chevalier 281). It also makes clear once more how the scholarly world of her time and place is not taking Mary seriously as a fellow scientist despite her expertise and experience. The letter leads to Elizabeth’s already mentioned journey to London where she persuades the incoming president of the Geological Society, to acknowledge publicly Mary’s contributions to science. However, not only Elizabeth’s interventions, but also Mary’s reactions create the image of a child-like figure here. In the case of Lord Henley’s appropriation of her fossil, she is unaware of, even indifferent to the problem. While Elizabeth is furious about what she perceives is an act of male betrayal and the patronizing ways in which Lord Henley explains his behavior, Mary does not respond accordingly. She does not feel betrayed at all; in fact, she appears not really to care about Lord Henley’s appropriation of her finding. Rather, she is excited that so many people saw her ‘croc’ in the museum in London (Chevalier 128-129). Likewise, she does not feel wronged by Birch but even allows him to take her virginity, something I will discuss in more detail in the next subchapter. When Cuvier accuses her of fraud, Mary behaves like a moping teenager (she is already twenty-one years old at the time), a very emotional girl rather than a competent scientific professional who is confident about her own skills and stands up for herself. “The silly girl’s taken it as an insult to her,’” her mother, Molly Anning, reports to Elizabeth. “‘Says the Frenchman has ruined her reputation as a hunter. She’s gone to bed over it, says there’s no reason to get up and hunt curies now, as no one’ll buy them’” (Chevalier 281). I do principally agree with Schaffeld that these fictional episodes allow Chevalier to highlight “female agency and resistance in the early days of paleontology” (“Historical Science Novel” 181), the ways in which women had supported each other in view of male opposition and patriarchal oppression. These scenes are also valuable for the ways in which they reveal the strategies used by men to keep their dominance over women. Nevertheless, assessing them from the perspective of Anning’s biography and her reception history, I find these moments also problematic because they undercut her Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 95 own agency and resistance, the ways in which she managed to stand up to the maledominated community by herself. While their friendship is empowering to them, it is very one-sided. The inequality between the women is expected given their different classes and ages. Yet Chevalier presents it in a way that I find unfortunate for Mary. While it is true that Anning relied upon people of the higher classes for support, the degree to which Elizabeth constantly intervenes each time Mary finds a key fossil takes away from her own agency and resistance. The strong focus on Mary’s childhood and youth as well as the patronizing way in which Elizabeth treats and sees her and is constantly rescuing her undermines the image of a strong woman who made her own way also because of her own actions. The novel reinforces the impression of Mary as a child-like figure by her pairing with the much older, socially elevated, and better accomplished Elizabeth. In contrast to Elizabeth’s well-informed and reflective perspective, Mary’s point of view feels, at times, extremely immature and narrow-minded. She adheres to folkloric language in the names that she gives the fossils she finds while Elizabeth provides the reader with the official Latin designations, the proper scientific names of the creatures, a language that Mary does not know and that excludes her from the scientific establishment. As Elizabeth explains: It was a relief to me to accept the ichthyosaurus as what it was – an ancient, marine reptile with its own name. Mary found it harder and often still called it a crocodile, […] though she eventually settled on ichie. To her the new scientific name took her creature away from her even more effectively than its physical removal. (Chevalier 181) The difference in their point of view, the limited, simple, and naïve perspective of Mary and Elizabeth’s sophisticated and educated viewpoint, also clearly emerge in the discussion of the fossil findings they make. Heilmann notes that the meaning of the novel’s title is twofold: while it designates the female protagonists, whose talent for discovering fossils lets numerous male scientist characters in the story declare what remarkable creatures they are, it also refers to the fossils unearthed from the cliffs of Lyme Regis (105). The confusions and eventual changes the discoveries of prehistoric reptiles brought to the predominant Bible-centered understanding of the origins of life and the history of the Earth in pre-Darwinian society of early nineteenth-century England are one of the main themes of the present narrative. In Remarkable Creatures, Chevalier recreates a world in which the precursors of the soon emerging scientific theories of extinction and evolution were starting to shake the established Biblical version of Creation. Mary begins to doubt the popular ideas held by many of her contemporaries that the fossils she finds are “crocodiles with huge eyes and snakes with no heads and thunderbolts God threw down that turned to stone” (Chevalier 72). While she is clearly irritated and confused, even unsettled, she does not seriously question Holy Scripture, as Schaffeld observes (“Historical Science Novel” 180). In keeping with the historical evidence, the novel makes clear that religion gave her a feeling of comfort and security in view of the bizarre creatures she unearths. “It made me feel odd looking at that eye, like there was a world of curiosities I didn’t know about […] it was as if the world was too strange for 102 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel not suggest that he stole from the Annings, that he exploited Mary in such or any other way. Quite the opposite seems to have been the case. Emling, for instance, writes that Birch “[o]ften went to Lyme Regis, where he took to visiting with Mary and her mother in their home, buying many fine specimens from them. […] Shortly after their first encounter, Mary discovered a nearly complete ichthyosaur, and Birch purchased it” (70, emphasis mine). By means of the romantic interlude, the novel also makes a problematic suggestion about Mary Anning herself. It once more evokes the image of the irrational child in need of protection (in this case from herself), a rebellious teenager who goes against the good advice offered to her, a naïve and immature girl whose emotions get her and her family into trouble. She falls in love with a man who is twice her age and outside of her own station in society and seriously believes that he will marry her and lift her “from the hard life of her own class into a kinder, more prosperous world” (Chevalier 191). Knowing that not even “Miss Austen would […] allow such a marriage to take place in her novels” (Chevalier 210), a well-meaning Elizabeth warns her that he will never consider marrying her and only compromise her reputation which is already stained due to her many unchaperoned interactions with the various scientific men seeking her help. The society presented deems being out alone on the beach with a man that one is not married or related to as improper female behavior, also for women of the working classes. The rumors spreading around town soon prove Elizabeth’s point. However, Mary is so infatuated with Birch and blinded by her feelings that she does not listen to her friend, nor does she care about the town’s gossip. She does also not realize that Elizabeth is right, that Birch is only using her for his personal gain. Even after he is gone, she believes that he will return to her. When her family starves and must sell the furniture because Mary is so love-sick that she is no longer able to hunt for fossils on the beach, she does still not blame him. Instead, the novel shows her to have a heavy heart and to hope to see him again soon. Even her own mother, generally “a good judge of character” (Chevalier 191), as Elizabeth remarks, is shown to allow herself to be carried away by Birch: “[s]he who had been so indignant at William Buckland innocently taking Mary out now threw away her caution for the price of a kiss on the hand and a kind word or two” (Chevalier 192). Worse than the extreme naivety and immaturity the novel ascribes to Mary here is the suggestion that she had somehow been complicit in her own subjugation and exploitation at the hands of the male scientific establishment, that knowingly and willingly she had allowed men like Birch to (ab-)use her for their own profit and to appropriate her work. Mary leads Birch on the beach and nudges him into finding specimens, including “perhaps the finest ichthyosaurus [she] ever found” (Chevalier 196). She allows him to believe that he discovered all of these by himself though she denies it when Elizabeth reminds her that he should be paying her. Chevalier suggests that Mary is so in love that she “let[s] him rob her of many specimens and call them his own finds” (Chevalier 189). Men had constantly appropriated and plagiarized Anning’s work, something that, as I have alluded to earlier, had increasingly embittered her. Surely, some have proposed that Anning had been extremely generous and perhaps much too tolerant with the men Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 103 of science, who often claimed her achievements as theirs without giving her proper credit. However, to suggest, as Chevalier does in the novel, that she freely let men (ab-) use her in this way is difficult, especially since there is no evidence to support this. Moreover, the scene also puts forward the idea that Mary deliberately downplays her own competence as a fossilist to please the man she hopes to marry which is highly problematic considering ongoing disputes about her scientific legacy and women’s scientific abilities and achievements past and present. There are different ways to interpret the function of this romantic episode for the story and against the background of Anning’s biography and reception history. One is that of gendering her as feminine. Heilmann sees in this romanticizing of Anning’s life and the subsequent exploration of her sexuality a desire to ‘feminize’ a historical woman who has often been portrayed as rather masculine by traditional male-oriented history writing (107-108). Heilmann argues, “Anning’s ‘afterlife’ exemplifies the considerable tensions and complex gender dynamics that underpin representations of early women scientists” (107). Referring to a characterization by Gideon Mantell (1790-1852), she notes that by exploring Mary’s emotional and erotic fulfilment, however short-lived, alongside her professional achievements, [Chevalier] reclaims her from the image of the ‘prim, pedantic, vinegar looking, thin female, shrewd and rather satirical in her conversation’ of [her] contemporary scientists’ descriptions. (108; for the original quotation from Mantell see Torrens 268). Thus, for Heilmann, the romantic interlude seems to be a way of restoring to her the femininity that especially the male scientists of her day have often denied her. Davis, too, observes that her contemporaries have frequently described Anning as having been rather ‘masculine’ in both look and character (107). He points to a short reference made in Chamber’s Journal in 1857 that styles Anning as having been “of rather masculine appearance” (qtd. in Davis 107). He also references a comment about her by Leichhardt from 1837 who refers to Anning as “…a strong, energetic spinster of about 28 years of age, tanned and masculine in expression…” (qtd. in Davis 107, omissions in original). One can attribute this perception of Anning to the gender bias towards women in science that sometimes still finds expression in current representations of female scientists. 29 It certainly also had to do with the way she dressed as her cloths needed to be warm and practical and created a “hybrid cross between masculine and feminine” (Lanone 78). Moreover, she certainly had a strong body due to the kind of work she was performing every day (Pierce 77). Davis notes that we know in fact very little of Anning’s appearance (107). There are only two portraits of her, one being a copy of the other, and there is a sketch made by de la Beche (Davis 107). The latter shows her as “a rather round figure with a hammer, and wearing a top hat, perhaps as protective headgear” (Sharpe 156). It might very well be part of the reason why so many continue to view her as masculine. 29 See for instance Eva Flicker’s typology of women in science in popular feature films which includes the so called ‘male woman’ that embodies traits normally associated more with masculinity than femininity as one of its archetypes (311). 104 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel One may find a genre-related explanation for the romantic interlude, too. Chevalier uses this episode as coming-of-age ritual for Mary. Gutenberg describes the first sex as a frequently found motif in initiation plots of the more contemporary and women-centered kind (184). It thus represents a genreand gender-typical moment of personal growth in which Mary realizes something important about the world and her place within it: Perhaps it was because of what had just happened to me, of the lightning that come from inside, which made me open up to larger, stranger thoughts. Looking up at the stars so far away, I begun to feel there was a thread running between the earth and them. Another thread was strung out too, connecting the past to the future, which the ichie at one end, dying all that long time ago and waiting for me to find it. I didn’t know what was at the other end of the thread. These two threads were so long I couldn’t even begin to measure them, and where one met the other, there was me. My life led up to that moment, then led away again, like the tide making its highest mark on the beach and then retreating. (Chevalier 258) The experience she allows the other female protagonist to make exemplifies that another, perhaps a bit more feminist-oriented moment of personal development or transformation might have been possible, too. Violating societal rules and worrying her sisters who think it a “folly” what she is doing (Chevalier 284), Elizabeth embarks on a short trip by ship all by herself and in the middle of winter to travel to London and convince the president of the Geological Society to acknowledge Mary’s professionalism to defend the accusation of fraud by Cuvier. On board of the vessel, she makes an important discovery about herself: “Until I boarded the Unity, I had always thought of the sea as a boundary keeping me in my place on land. Now, though, it became an opening. […] I had no choice but to see the greater world, and my place within it” (Chevalier 286-287, italics in original). Over the course of her journey, Elizabeth gains new confidence and self-awareness, a sense of her own identity as a woman and a fossilist, someone independent of her male relatives and the men-only scientific establishment: “I was responsible for myself. I was Elizabeth Philpot, and I collected fossil fish” (Chevalier 289). When returning from her trip, Mary notices that something about Elizabeth has changed: “She was like a fossil that’s been cleaned and set so everyone can see what it is” (Chevalier 339). Chevalier also uses the romantic subplot as a means for the women to redefine their relationship with each other and certainly to create some additional dramatic tension in the story. Birch functions as an irritation, even a source of conflict, in their relationship causing feelings of jealousy and disappointment and some rather unfortunate rivaling behavior for the attention and affection of the same man. Gutenberg says that in contemporary (English) literature, female friendship plots often feature a male intruder, that men often threaten women’s relationships with each other in novels of this kind (219). Hence, the attraction to and ensuing competition might be just the kind of stereotypical complication readers would expect in a story like this. While Mary falls immediately and visibly in love with Birch, Elizabeth experiences some difficulties in revealing her true feelings. She eventually admits to the reader that she “was a little in love with him myself” (Chevalier 190). She explains that Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 105 [f]or all my complaints, I found him very attractive: not only physically, though there was that, but because his interest in fossils seemed genuine and penetrating. When he was not flirting with Mary, he was capable – and keen – to discuss the origins of the ichthyosaurus, and what it meant to be extinct. (Chevalier 190) Elizabeth becomes increasingly jealous as Birch, for reasons I have outlined above, prefers Mary: “My anger at him stemmed […] from indignation that he never for a moment considered me – closer to his age and of a similar class – as a lady he might court” (Chevalier 190). Mary’s love for Birch, her extreme naiveté, and Elizabeth’s complicated feelings of jealousy paired with her wish to protect her young friend and colleague eventually lead to a year-long breach between the two protagonists. In a way that is not beneficial to the story, the rivalry casts doubt on the idea of female solidarity and sisterhood that defines the novel. That they reconcile in the end and that they miss each other during this time apart shows that Chevalier does not want to devalue the power of female bonds or their relationship. In fact, it is when seeing Elizabeth again that Mary experiences her most important jolt of lightning, a “lightning that signalled my greatest happiness, in all my life” (Chevalier 337), one greater than any of the fossil findings or the discovery of her own sexuality in the intimate moment with Birch provides her with. The women’s association is resilient enough to endure such challenges brought about by heterosexual love. The final scene portrays the two women on the beach together hunting for fossils and thus circles back to the image the reader finds on the front cover of the book. The women realize the strength of their alliance, that their friendship is their strongest asset. Mary’s last sentence is: “So we continued, arm in arm along the beach, talking until at last we had no more to say, like a storm that blows itself out, and our eyes dropped to the ground, where the curies were waiting for us to find them” (Chevalier 340). Elizabeth’s final words, too, suggest a recreation of harmony between them: “We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back” (Chevalier 343). Hence, the story ends “on the kind of domestic companionship and friendship that women could offer each other – and on their ability to live well and happily without any connection with men” (Caine 196). It even suggests that they are now at eye level when Elizabeth asks Mary to call her by her first name, a request that might be seen as an act of erasing all class difference between them, Glendening suggests (60). Remarkable Creatures does conclude with a “feminist success story,” as Heilmann is convinced (107). Nonetheless, that a man comes between them is still one of the gendered tropes about women’s relationships I find rather problematic about this story. For a novel that tries to make a point about women’s friendships and collaborations, the use of a rivalry for the attention and affection of the same man is a rather unfortunate and cliché-laden way of complicating their relationship, of adding another layer of complexity to their bond. It reinstates a conservative, male-oriented plot line and patriarchal gender stereotypes into a progressive female-centered approach to her story that suggest women to be not only caring but also spiteful and competitive. With its focus on the friendship and collaboration between two female characters, Remarkable Creatures subverts “the conventional marriage or erotic plot” which Carolyn Heilbrun once identified as the prevalent plot pattern for the retelling of women’s 106 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel lives (48). Unlike many traditional-oriented biographies and biofictions of women that chart female lives by means of their relationships (friendships, liaisons, or marriages) with prominent and powerful men, this novel represents its chosen subject’s life through her association with another woman and thus constitutes a more progressive approach in female-centered biofictional writing of a historical woman’s life. The novel still perpetuates the heteronormative idea of women’s ultimate fulfillment in marriage and motherhood and thus prefers a conservative idea about female lives. In this aspect, the novel reminded me of Marcel LaFolette’s study of biographies of female scientists in American popular magazines between 1910 and 1955, in which its author noted that “even women who were successful scientists […] were [portrayed as being] still more fulfilled through marriage and motherhood than through research” (265-266). Both Mary and Elizabeth have a rather unconventional lifestyle and go against the norm with their bold characters and interest in fossils; they are both outcasts in society because of their unusual occupation, and because of their status as unmarried, childless women. Hill emphasizes that many women in history consciously chose not to marry and have children to follow other pursuits, especially their intellectual callings (81-93). Elizabeth and Mary’s lifestyles are not the result of a conscious decision in the sense of a feministmotivated breaking with traditional, patriarchal gender roles, however. Both women are not actively challenging normative gender roles, refusing to conform to societal expectations of marriage and motherhood. Rather, they cannot perform the expected feminine roles and are devastated about this and jealous of women who are more successful on the marriage market. They perceive of themselves as “the unfortunate ones who failed in their efforts to get a husband” (Hill 3) even though they learn to cherish the independence they have as ‘spinsters’ and the value of their friendship. As an unmarried uppermiddle-class woman in her mid-twenties who people in town are reported to make fun of as “the London [lady] too peculiar even to get a Lyme man” (Chevalier 64), Elizabeth is more than aware that she is a “‘failed woman’” in the eyes of her society, someone “to be pitied or derided” (Hill 1). She constantly agonizes over the fact that her looks and character have not allowed her to find a husband and thus start a family of her own: “‘I never said I didn’t want to marry. I just didn’t happen. I am not the sort of lady a man chooses to marry, for I am too plain and serious’” (Chevalier 92). She feels that even women socially inferior to her, such as Mary’s mother Molly, look down upon her: “I knew she did not think much of me, for I was the embodiment of what she did not want Mary to become: unmarried and obsessed with fossils” (Chevalier 93). Elizabeth believes that Molly pities her “for I had never known a man, never felt the security of marriage or the love of a baby in my arms” (Chevalier 191). However, Elizabeth learns to accept her ‘spinsterhood.’ She even comes to appreciate the freedom it gives her. After all, the absence of a husband allows her to pursue her scientific interest, for “a married lady [would not] be out on the beach, far from home, hunting for fossils” (Chevalier 184). Nonetheless, Elizabeth is constantly hoping that she will still find someone to marry, preferably one of the gentlemen scientists. Such a match would en- Excavating Mary Anning in Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures 107 able her to have both married life and a continuing research activity as well as greater access to the scientific community: […] a match between [William Buckland] and me was not such a mad idea. Granted I was several years older than him, and too old to have many children. But it was not impossible. […] William Buckland and I were of similar social standing, and intellectually suited. Of course I was not educated to his degree, but I read widely. I knew enough about geology and fossils to be a supportive wife to him in his profession. (Chevalier 179) Marriage to a fellow scientist would provide her with the opportunity to escape singleness, conform to societal expectations of women, and, at the same time, overcome some of the gendered restrictions of the institution of science. Mary, too, is envious of married women and believes herself to have little prospects when it comes to marriage because of her occupation: “I know I won’t marry. No one wants someone like me for a wife” (Chevalier 257). She understands that being a fossil hunter and dealer and having a family are not compatible in the eyes of society. Birch tries to make her see it in a positive light: “There are many women – most women, in fact – who can be perfectly good wives. But there is only one like you” (Chevalier 257). Mary is not convinced, however. When seeing her former friend Fanny Miller with her husband, Mary seems devastated about missing out this kind of relationship in her life: “their marriage reminded me that I […] would never marry. Fanny was getting all the time what I experienced only the once with Colonel Birch in the orchard. I had my fame to comfort me, and the money it brought in, but that only went so far” (Chevalier 323). Both Mary and Elizabeth long for the kind of life that would not have allowed them to do what they were doing, for the novel makes clear that their status as single women is what allows them to pursue their scientific interests. By means of this longing for marriage, the novel reiterates the very male-oriented view it supposedly seeks to counteract in narrating the story of two long-forgotten historical women who struggled against the patriarchal system of science and society in Regency England. Perhaps Chevalier thought this would make it more realistic for the time depicted. It displays how patriarchal thinking of appropriate gender roles for women deeply affects both protagonists on a psychological level, as they are both not able to perform them yet feel pressured by society and their own internalized patriarchal thinking to do so. It also shows them as women with a conflicted identity, who try to conform to certain expectations while openly flouting others. Nevertheless, as scholars like Hill have shown, there have also been women in the past who enjoyed singleness and who sometimes chose it deliberately to be able to dedicate their lives to interests and endeavors other than marriage and motherhood. Thus, a different interpretation of the women’s ‘spinsterhood’ could have been possible and equally accurate of the period portrayed in the novel. The conservative gender agenda that underlies the authorial conception and narrative representation of the relationship between the women in Remarkable Creatures must be seen as counterproductive when considering the overall feminist goal of making women in the history of nineteenth-century geology and paleontology visible and have their abilities and achievements valued by twenty-first-century readers. 108 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel 3.1.6 Conclusion A fictionalized account of the intertwined lives of two historic women fossilists whose contributions have often been denied or undervalued, Remarkable Creatures can surely be considered a “feminist counter-narrative of nineteenth century science” that is engaged in the celebration and commemoration of “the contribution of women to the history of science,” as suggested by Heilmann (92, 109). The novel’s revisionist agenda becomes visible in the light it sheds on Anning and to some extent Philpot’s scarcely known lives and long-neglected achievements. It also manifests itself in the strong case the fictional narrative makes for female friendship despite severe differences in age, class, education, and religious orientation as well as sisterly solidarity, sustenance, and support as a means of women’s functioning even survival in view of male opposition and patriarchal oppression in the deeply sexist and stratified society of Georgian England. With the example of Anning and Philpot, Remarkable Creatures raises awareness of a vital, yet so far little-known aspect of the female experience in (science) history. I mean the kind of personal and professional relationships women had formed and maintained with each other and the ways in which their alliances and communities had served them as an important space for intellectual exchange, scientific education and training, moral guidance, emotional and sometimes also financial support. Associations such as those of Anning and Philpot but also others like Mary Somerville and Ada Lovelace, who feature in a later chapter in this study, show that personal friendships and scientific mentorand partnerships among women have been a vital tool of female support. By highlighting the friendship and collaboration between two representative women in the history of nineteenth-century geology and thus showing that other like-minded females have always surrounded women in science, Chevalier also questions the prevailing cultural perception of historical female scientists as mere exceptions to the rule. Chevalier weakens the feminist potential of her novel, however, when she decides to use her poetic license for the inclusion of a fictional romantic subplot. An unfulfilled love interest is arguably an important step in Mary’s personal development and a sexual encounter an important experience of initiation. Nevertheless, the rift that the invented romance causes in the empowering friendship between the two women and the traditional gender roles it reinstates seem rather counterproductive to this otherwise feminist portrait of strong, ambitious, and talented females in the history of science. Chevalier’s reliance on popular myths about her chosen protagonist as well as gendered clichés of female lives and women’s relationships stand in stark contrast to the revisionist ambitions driving this relational herstorical biofiction. Thus, while one might applaud Remarkable Creatures for the attention it draws to Anning’s life and the role of sisterly support and solidarity in the history of women in science, one must also criticize it for perpetuating a rather stereotypical image of both female lives and women’s relationships with each other as well as of its chosen protagonist who once again emerges from the pages of this book as the child who made great fossil discoveries. Astronomer Caroline Herschel, who features in Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister, is also unable to shake off the image that history has bestowed upon her, that of her brother’s self-sacrificing ‘Cinderella sister’. 3.2 The Stars, Sibling Love, and a Scientific Fairy Tale: Remembering Caroline Herschel, “the First Professional Female Astronomer in History,” 30 in Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister (2015) “I am nothing, I have done nothing; all I am, all I know, I owe to my brother. I am only the tool which he shaped to his use – a well-trained puppy-dog would have done as much.” Caroline Herschel about herself (M. Herschel, Memoir ix) More than fifty years of feminist research on women’s history have shown that the androcentric focus of traditional historiography has often failed to do justice to the lives and achievements of women who had lived in previous centuries. Still dominant patriarchal conceptions of cultural significance and historical noteworthiness frequently led to the exclusion of women and thus to the invisibility of their roles and contributions in the official records of the past. On the rare occasion that historical women had been considered worthy of historiographical attention, the patriarchal ideology operating within conventional history writing has often led to rather problematic portrayals of their characters and lives. Scholarly studies testify to the gender bias running through representations of women throughout history. They have shown the ways in which their “work is belittled or devalued in favor of their liaisons with famous and infamous men” (Trofimenkoff 3). Moreover, they have pointed to how women in history were often remembered more readily for their gender identities than for their notable abilities and accomplishments (Zimmermann 17), and how women’s achievements were all too often qualified in terms of their womanhood: “She did this at the expense of her femininity; she did that without neglecting her duties as wife and mother” (Trofimenkoff 3). The posthumous reputation of the German-born yet England-based astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) also attests to this long-prevailing historiographical tendency to remember historical women more in terms of their feminine qualities and their romantic or familial relationships than for their outstanding achievements. 31 Herschel’s most significant successes as a woman in science were the discovery of eight comets as well as her correction of the Star Atlas by Flamsteed. These achievements were made in addition to the untiring support that she had provided her older brother with, the astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822), with whom she had worked during her career. For these noteworthy scientific contributions, she was celebrated by the public as well as the all-male astronomical elite of her day, and not to forget the royal family. Because of the attention and acknowledgements that she had received in her own day, Herschel stands out among her female contemporaries. Unlike many other women in the history of science, Herschel managed to become officially recognized and even financially rewarded 30 Hoskin, “Mortifications” 451. 31 A note on my use of names in this chapter is necessary: Caroline Herschel, born Carolina Lucretia Herschel, and her brother William, born Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel, both adopted the English rendition of their first names after moving to the English town of Bath in 1772. Since Carrie Brown uses their English forenames in The Stargazer’s Sister, I will do so as well within this study. 110 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel for her scientific contributions already during her own lifetime and, moreover, to be remembered by the traditional male-oriented historical narrative of science (Winterburn, “Learned Modesty” 7). However, far more than for her own astronomical discoveries and her important cataloguing work, it was the self-sacrificing sisterly support of her brother William Herschel which had earned her a place in the historical narrative of astronomy. “Much has been made about her selfless devotion to his studies, her long nights of waiting for his command to write down stellar position, her placing bits of food into his mouth when, due to excessive concentration on work, he had forgotten or was too tired to eat himself,” Claire Brock observes (5). Throughout the past, historians and biographers have not only stressed her role as William Herschel’s dedicated and dutiful assistant, even stylized her into the stereotypical “ideal of what an assistant should be” (Clerke 140). The (over-)emphasis of Herschel’s womanly qualities and her part as William’s assistant was often accompanied by a strategic downplaying of the significance of her own astronomical discoveries as well as a highlighting of the limitations of her scientific abilities: “Caroline Herschel was not a woman of genius. Her mind was sound and vigorous, rather than brilliant. No abstract enthusiasm inspired her; no line of inquiry attracted her; she seems to have remained ignorant even of the subsequent history of her comets. She prized them as trophies,” noted Agnes M. Clerke in her 1895 biography (139). The male bias of traditional historiography is also evident in the frequent romanticization of her story. Indeed, the patriarchal trivialization of her independently made scientific contributions was all too often embedded in a heavily sentimentalized, almost fairy-tale-like version of her life story. Emily Winterburn remarks that “[s]he is very often, even now, described as ‘astronomy’s Cinderella.’ Her mother, meanwhile, is cast with annoying regularity as the wicked stepmother while William gets to be her savior prince” (Quiet Revolution 9). The gender-stereotypical fairy tale-motif of a damsel in distress who must be rescued from her fate as domestic servant in her parents’ home by her knight in shining armor, in this case her older brother William, and who out of gratitude for her liberation dedicates her life to this prince charming and his career has followed Herschel through many biographical accounts of her life. Michael Hoskin is undoubtedly the leading scholar on the Herschel siblings and he, too, relies on the caricatures of Cinderella, the wicked stepmother, and prince charming (see for example Priestess). Also, some of the more recent feminist-oriented accounts of her story adopt these fairy tale-motifs (see, for example, Fara, “Caroline Herschel,” Pandora’s Breeches). That Caroline Herschel has so far generally been perceived as nothing but the dedicated and dutiful assistant to her famous brother rather than a distinguished astronomer in her own right is partially due to her own insistence on the insignificance of the contributions she had made and the unimportance of the role she had played, Brock explains (219). Caroline Herschel saw herself as her brother’s tool, which he could sharpen as required, for his musical and later astronomical endeavors. She is regularly quoted to have claimed about herself once: “I am nothing, I have done nothing; all I am, all I know, I owe to my brother. I am only the tool which he shaped to his use – a well-trained Remembering Caroline Herschel in Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister 111 puppy-dog would have done as much” (M. Herschel, Memoir ix). Looking at Caroline Herschel’s own memoirs it becomes clear that she contributed to, perhaps even created, the image of her in public discourse. And yet, one needs to be careful when taking selfcharacterizations like these at face value. While Patricia Fara maintains that this “selfabnegating remark cannot simply be dismissed,” that “this picture conforms to the version of reality that she recorded for her heirs” (“Caroline Herschel” 124), others have cautioned against taking utterances like these as an accurate and literally-meant selfcharacterization. In their assessment, this ignores historical context of eighteenthand nineteenth-century science and society and the ways in which women had to negotiate their place within them. Those who take these words at face value, argues historian and Herschel biographer Winterburn, clearly misunderstand the rigid social restrictions on women at the time. Herschel, she claims, was highly aware of the sexist attitudes towards learned women that defined her lifetime and carefully and consciously created this image of herself to make her scientific ambitions socially acceptable (see “Learned Modesty,” “Self-Presentation,” Quiet Revolution). Over the course of the last couple of decades, Caroline Herschel’s life has not only found its way into several factual biographies (for example Brock 2007, Ogilvie 2011, Hoskin 2013, McCombs 2017, Winterburn 2017, to name only some of the more current ones). Lately, her story has also been told in a series of biographical fictions of which Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister (2015) is not only the most recently published but probably also best-known example. 32 Brown has written a total of seven (historical) novels and a collection of short stories. The Stargazer’s Sister is her most recent novel. In The Stargazer’s Sister, Brown opts for a relational approach to the chosen female subject’s life story. This is already foreshadowed by the given title, which positions and thus presents the historical woman in relationship to the arguably most important man in her life, namely her brother William. The title of this fact-based fictional account of Herschel’s life surely is a fitting though from a feminist perspective also problematic choice for this period novel which narrates the fascinating tale of the Herschel siblings William and Caroline and their close relationship, “one perhaps unparalleled in scientific history” (Brown 326). The novel does not take a multi-perspective approach but concentrates instead on Caroline and her female point of view. As Brown explains: “It was always Caroline – the satellite star, not the planet – in whom I was most interested. I was interested in the life that was more difficult to discover, more hidden, the life whose sorrows and compromises were not readily apparent, a life whose silences were 32 Within the English-speaking literary context further examples include, for instance, Christina Koning’s Variable Stars (2011) as well as Kelley Swain’s Double the Stars (2014), both of which have been released by relatively small publishing houses – Arbuthnot Books and Cinnamon Press respectively – and have presumably for that reason not received the kind of widespread public attention that Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister experienced, which was published by Pantheon Books (Penguin Random House). I also came across two German-speaking biofictions about Caroline Herschel in my research: Eva Maaser’s Die Astronomin [The Female Astronomer] (2004) und Ruth Kornberger’s Die Symphonie der Sterne [The Symphony of Stars] (2022). 118 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel tifications” 453). And she became very capable at that. “The employment of writing down the observations, when my brother uses the 20-feet reflector, does not often allow me time to look at the heavens; but as he is now on a visit to Germany, I have taken the opportunity of his absence to sweep in the neighborhood of the sun, in search of comets…,” she wrote in a letter to Charles Blagden (1748-1820) which was read as An Account of a New Comet at the Royal Society on November 9, 1786 (qtd. in Hoskin, “Observer” 384, italics and omission in original). Between 1786 and 1797, she discovered eight comets, at least five of which had never been previously spotted (Olson and Pasachoff 8-13). By the time of Herschel’s first comet discovery, thousands of others had already been identified, as Winterburn points out (“Learned Modesty” 4). Olson and Pasachoff speak of a “comet fever” rampant at the time (6). Herschel’s 1786 comet was the first ever ‘lady’s comet,’ however, the first comet discovered by a woman, and she became quite a sensation for it at the time (Winterburn, “Learned Modesty” 4). She also discovered several nebulae and star clusters (Hoskin, “Assistant” 432). Moreover, she undertook an extensive correction, reorganization, and addition of John Flamsteed’s Catalogue of Stars (Hoskin, “Mortifications” 456). She did so at William’s suggestion, “so he might have a version of the catalogue on which he could rely” (Hoskin, “Mortifications” 456). Her work, which she completed over a period of two years, was printed by the Royal Society in 1798 at their expenses and bearing her own name. It contained an index of every observation of every star made by Flamsteed, a list of errata, and a list of more than 561 stars that had not been included (Hoskin, “Mortifications” 456). Later she helped her nephew John Herschel (1792-1871), William’s only son, in his astronomical work. Initially working as “his father’s assistant,” John Herschel eventually became his father’s “heir in astronomy” dedicated to “revising and completing William’s great work” (Hoskin, “Mortifications” 459). When her brother William died in 1822, Caroline Herschel moved back to Hanover. Though separated by a long distance, she continued to guide, encourage, and support her nephew (Hoskin, “Unquiet Heart” 25). Late in life, Caroline Herschel continued to verify and confirm her already deceased brother’s findings and completed a Zone Catalogue of all the nebulae and star clusters observed by him (Hoskin, “Mortifications” 460-461). According to Hoskins, this was a “mammoth enterprise,” and “arguably the greatest of her many contributions to astronomy, and it earned her the Gold Medal of the future Royal Astronomical Society” (“Mortifications” 460-461). Apparently, Herschel was so proud of this honor that she had it engraved in her tombstone (Hoskin, “Unquiet Heart” 25). She died in 1848 at the age of ninety-seven after having lived for almost a century. There seems to be little doubt of the groundbreaking nature of William Herschel’s contributions to astronomy. The discovery of a new (eighth) planet was “unprecedented in the history of the world” and catapulted him “from obscurity to world-wide celebrity, essentially overnight,” Michael Lemonick explains (18, 19). Lemonick clarifies that his scientific achievements were so important “it’s not exaggeration to say that modern astronomy was invented, more or less, by William Herschel in the last decades of the eighteenth century” (19). William Herschel’s reputation as an astronomer is of the first Remembering Caroline Herschel in Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister 119 order. The role and place attributed to Caroline Herschel by the male-dominated historical narrative of science has often been a secondary one, however. Unlike many other women scientists in history, Caroline Herschel had not been erased from the scientific records and thus our cultural memory of the past. Her story, which is usually related alongside that of her brother William, has been frequently told throughout the past and is thus rather well-known to historians of science, Winterburn emphasizes (“Learned Modesty” 3). Until not so long ago, her life had often been presented in a highly reductive and clearly gendered way. It is beyond dispute that Caroline Herschel had been an invaluable attendant to William. In addition to running his bachelor household, she had “acted as his amanuensis during the night watches, seated by an open window ready to record whatever her brother called out as he stood with his eye to the telescope” (Hoskin, “Assistant” 425). While she faithfully recorded his observations and compiled his findings, she also undertook meticulous calculations and produced exhaustive transcriptions of his notes (Hoskin, “Mortifications” 442). Furthermore, she prepared his work for publication (Hoskin, “Mortifications” 442, “Unquiet Heart” 26). She copied his correspondence and scientific papers. She also supported her brother in the construction of telescopes. This included “spending long hours pounding horse-dung for the mould [in which the disks of mirrors would be grinded and polished]” (Hoskin, “Assistant” 429). But the untiring and crucial assistance she had provided her brother with in his exploration of the night skies and the building of telescopes are but one part of her many contributions to astronomy. Herschel also worked independently of her brother making her own discoveries and contributing her own work to astronomical discourse (Olson and Pasachoff 5). Nevertheless, in the history of science, Herschel has often been reduced to a secondary character, a one-dimensional figure, remembered for her devotion to her brother but not for her own achievements. While she had been famous in her own day as a great comet huntress, it was above all her more suitably feminine role as William’s dutiful and dedicated assistant that historians and biographers stressed when recounting her story in the decades, even centuries, to come. The introductory words of Memoir and Correspondence of Caroline Herschel (1876), a collection of selected letters and diary entries by the female astronomer issued posthumously by her family, prove an ideal example for the kind of popular narrative that has been attached to Caroline Herschel’s story in many accounts of her life: Great men and great causes have always some helper of whom the outside world knows but little. These helpers […] men or women, have all the same quality in common – absolute devotion and unwavering faith in the individual or in the cause. Seeking nothing for themselves, thinking nothing of themselves, they have all an intense power of sympathy, a noble love of giving themselves for the service of others, which enables them to transfuse the force of their own personality into the object to which they dedicate their powers. Of this noble company of unknown helpers Caroline Herschel was one. She stood beside her brother, William Herschel, sharing his labours, helping his life. […] By sheer force of will and devoted affection, she learned enough of mathematics and of methods of calculation, which to those unlearned seem mysteries, to be able to commit to writing the results of his researches. She became his assistant in the workshop; she helped him to grind and polish his mirrors; she stood beside his telescope in the nights of midwinter, to 120 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel write down his observations, when the very ink was frozen in the bottle. She kept him alive by her care; thinking nothing of herself, she lived for him. She loved him, and believed in him, and helped him, with all her heart and with all her strength. She might have become a distinguished woman on her own account, for with the ‘seven-foot Newtonian sweeper’ given to her by her brother, she discovered eight comets first and last. But the pleasure of seeking and finding for herself was scarcely tasted. She ‘minded the heavens’ for her brother; she worked for him, not for herself, and the unconscious self-denial with which she gave up her own pleasure in the use of her ‘sweeper,’ is not the least beautiful feature in her life. (v-vii) The stereotypical image of a self-sacrificing sister who altruistically commits herself to the career of her brother and who unstintingly supports him in all his astronomical endeavors has determined her story for much of the past. There is no denying that William Herschel’s successes were also due in large part to his younger sister Caroline, “his faithful companion in stargazing” (Olson and Pasachoff 3), who had supported him throughout his life, and who had thus helped him in becoming the astronomer that he eventually was. While the nurturing care, self-sacrificing dedication, and obedient persistence with which Herschel had assisted her favorite brother in his explorations of the night skies have been (over-)emphasized throughout the past, her scientific interests and professional desires as well as her own agency, especially the way in which she managed to gain access to and acceptance in the maledominated world of eighteenthand nineteenth-century science have all too often been critically neglected or even outright dismissed; her independently made astronomical discoveries are often shown to “simply […] have happened to her” (Winterburn, Quiet Revolution 11). Other aspects of her story, for instance her “profoundly ambitious nature” and “lifelong belief in the value of independence” (Brock 8-9) as well as her “active role in shaping her [scientific] education and public image” (Winterburn, “SelfPresentation” 80), her ability to carve out a place for herself in the male-dominated world of science have generally been ignored or were simply not seen or understood. It is only in recent years that scholars have begun to offer a different interpretation of her, to create a different image of her by means of a reconsideration of her story through the lens of contemporary feminist scholarship on the history of women in science. In the context of the women’s movement, the life story of Herschel was also interpreted in a new light and attempts were made to bring her out of the shadow of her famous brother, to see her less as a mere assistant and more as an astronomer in her own right. In her biography The Comet Sweeper (2007), Claire Brock seeks to rehabilitate Herschel. Brock stresses her own astronomical ambitions noting that “she was not simply an amanuensis or general dogsbody. Caroline Herschel made her own original findings, separate from the work she carried out for her illustrious brother” (1). Brock claims that “Herschel may have followed her brother’s instructions, but she was determined to achieve more than anyone could ask of her” (6). She emphasizes her great ambition as well as her desire for independence. For Winterburn, Herschel was clearly ambitious, though she would also be careful to not appear too ambitious to remain within the boundaries of appropriate female behavior which was based on modesty, among Remembering Caroline Herschel in Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister 121 other things (“Learned Modesty” 3-4, “Self-Presentation” 77-79). Her ambition can be seen, for example, in how “she actively sought recognition and credit” (Winterburn, “Self-Presentation” 79). However, Winterburn is more reluctant to ascribe her a desire for independence. In her assessment, Herschel did not seek to embark on an independent career; she closely identified with “the Herschel family project” (“Self-Presentation” 79). This, however, was not in conflict with (a longing for) receiving appreciation and acknowledgement for her achievements and abilities (“Self-Presentation” 79). The feminist-motivated reappraisal of her story is not without problems. Winterburn rightly points out, this retrospective heroization, this singling out of women as lost heroines, often does not correspond to the historical circumstances (“Learned Modesty” 7-8). She asks us to keep in mind that “women have, for a variety of educational, social and cultural reasons, historically taken on different roles in science to men. [...] tasks carried out by women, and other low status groups, have historically been labelled less ‘scientific’ than those carried out by white upper class men” (“Learned Modesty” 7-8). These roles were often seen as subordinate and by consequence remained historically invisible which is one of the reasons why the cultural narrative and public memory of science in the past is dominated by the achievements of ‘great men.’ Fara cautions us to not overstate the case with historical women in science. She claims that we cannot simply transport women from one stereotype into the next, “from the docile assistant, and the doting but ignorant source of inspiration” to “the lonely, unappreciated pioneer” (“Caroline Herschel” 123). Many historians and biographers, Fara points out, try to “convert her into a female icon of science” and “have rewritten Caroline Herschel’s story to underline […] the contributions she made towards breaking down prejudice against scientific women” (Pandora’s Breeches 149). Fara asks us to always consider the historical context when celebrating female lives and contributions in the past from a contemporary perspective to avoid retrospective misrepresentations that may do more harm than good to the feminist cause: When does a shift of emphasis become an exaggeration, a distortion? Scientific women have been concealed for so long that it’s very tempting to overstate the case and convert them into unsung heroines. Retelling women’s stories to make them conform with modern ideals is historically insensitive; moreover, it is not very helpful for understanding how the past has led to the present. (Pandora’s Breeches 149, cf. “Caroline Herschel” 123) Undoubtedly, Fara is right here: exaggerating the roles played by women like Herschel in the history of astronomy is problematic. But what I find just as problematic is not cherishing the full range of female contributions due to a narrow focus on scientific achievements as a male endeavor and an understanding of women’s roles in science as subordinate and secondary. Despite recent feminist-motivated reappraisals of her life and abilities and achievements, Herschel’s status as a significant “astronomer in her own right” (Brock 12) continues to be debated. Even in the twenty-first century, Kevin McCombs remarks, there are still historians and biographers who show themselves reluctant to describe her as a 122 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel scientist in her own right (84). For Hoskin, Herschel was “rightly esteemed throughout Europe […] for her own achievements as a comet-huntress” (“Assistant” 425). She was indispensable to her brother, crucial to his achievements. Hoskin notes that without her, William Herschel would never have achieved what he did, he would “never have transformed astronomy from the study of the solar system to the exploration of the cosmos” (“Assistant” 442). Yet he places some clear restrictions to her abilities and achievements noting that she was definitely “no scientist” (Hoskin, Priestess 162). Hoskin uses her comet discoveries, which have often been stressed by those in favor of her role as an important astronomer in her own right, to support his point that she did not possess the kind of scientific curiosity and intellectual ambition that defines a scientist. He depicts her as ignorant of and disinterested in her own discoveries claiming that “she has no interest in comets as such. There is no hint that she ever wondered about the physical makeup of the comets she had discovered, or their role in the economy of nature (to refuel the Sun, perhaps), or even whether they would return” (Priestess 162). According to Hoskin, her life revolved around providing her services to her brother who had been “fortunate beyond words in having such a devoted assistant constantly on the lookout for ways in which she could advance his great enterprise” (“Unquiet Heart” 24, 27). He further justifies his view of Herschel by noting the following: “One feels that if William’s interests had taken a different course, and it had been (say) fossils that she had been told to go out and find, she would have responded with equal diligence and equal lack of interest in the significance of her discoveries” (“Assistant” 443). To him, she is thus better described as William Herschel’s “indispensable collaborator” (“Observer” 373) and his “faithful companion” (Discoverers x). Adopting the canine metaphor that Herschel had once used to describe herself, he dismisses her as “an obedient gundog, told to go and retrieve trophies”. He even goes so far as to argue that “the history of astronomy would have been the same if she had never found a comet” (“Assistant” 443). Winterburn argues that Hoskin’s evaluation of her abilities and achievements is based on a very narrow understanding of astronomy as being “the calculations and theorizing following discoveries” (“Self-Presentation” 78). In the case of Herschel, many scholars have shown themselves reluctant to cast her as a feminist heroine of science because of the ways in which she presented herself, her role, and her work. Surely, Herschel’s life “does not lend herself to the heroic stories of discovery we are used to hearing about,” Winterburn argues (Quiet Revolution 13). She appears to have been a woman “happy enough to remain in the background and to conform with the social customs of [her] day” (Brück xvii). Perhaps she colluded in this role “dreading being labelled a bluestocking” (Brück xvii). Other present-day scholars have cautioned not to overstate the case here. For Fara, there is no denying that Herschel was a woman of great talent who had made important and independent contributions to astronomy. Yet, she “willingly endured a satellite existence” and “allowed her reputation to be eclipsed by her brother’s”. But this “satellite existence” that she “willingly endured” (Fara, “Caroline Herschel 124) has of late also been seen with different eyes, namely as a conscious and careful strategy used by Herschel to carve out a place for herself in the male-dominated Remembering Caroline Herschel in Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister 123 world of nineteenth-century astronomy (cf. Winterburn, “Self-Presentation,” “Learned Modesty”). 3.2.2 “A Well-Trained Puppy-Dog Would Have Done as Much” 33 : Herschel’s Carefully Crafted Yet Often Misunderstood Image of Herself Unlike many scientifically inclined women at the time, Herschel had successfully and visibly entered the male-dominated world of science of her day. That she was publicly acknowledged for her achievements and abilities as a woman in astronomy must be credited in part to her brother. It would have been within the conventions of the time if William had claimed her achievements as his, Winterburn explains, after all, “[h]e was the male figurehead of the family’s scientific enterprise and therefore he was the official discoverer of everything they found, the maker of all their telescopes and the creator of all their theoretical work” (Quiet Revolution 40). While science has always been a joint effort based on the work of many different people, for much of the past it was usually only those at the forefront of the important scientific discovery that were honored and remembered. Against the conventions of the time, William Herschel had not claimed Caroline’s discoveries as his (Winterburn, Quiet Revolution 39-40). He had allowed his sister to be acknowledged for her abilities and achievements. Winterburn explains this with the different nature of their scientific partnership, as they were brother and sister and not husband and wife (“Self-Presentation” 79). She also suggests a connection to the Herschel sibling’s initial musical career, for in music, “public recognition for each individual contribution was standard” (“Self-Presentation” 79). That she was so widely accepted and even admired by both the public and the scientific community of her own day is also Caroline Herschel’s own merit. She knew how to present herself and her work in a way that made it acceptable to be welcomed and even celebrated, Winterburn explains (“Learned Modesty” 4). She knew “how to manage her public image” (Winterburn, “Self-Presentation” 80). She made sure her voice was heard and her observations were taken seriously (Winterburn, Quiet Revolution 228). Moreover, she found male scientists next to William who supported her claims (Winterburn, Quiet Revolution 230). In the context of the feminist-motivated rediscovery and rewriting of the history of science from the previously neglected and omitted perspectives of scientifically inclined women, historians of science have not only focused on the gendered restrictions that women interested and engaged in scientific education and work encountered throughout the centuries (Kohlstedt and Opitz 105-106). Historians of women in science have also revealed the various ways in which female scientists carefully and often strategically negotiated their place within the men’s world of science throughout the past, also through modes of self-presentation. They have pointed to “the sometimes unconscious and sometimes consciously strategic ways in which women negotiated gender norms, bringing their own agency to the pursuit of their scientific aspirations” (Kohlstedt 33 C. Herschel ix. 124 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel and Opitz 105). According to Ute Hoffmann, one of the most widespread ways in which female scientists harmonized their interference into the male domain of science with the prevailing gender expectations of their day was camouflage (53-54). Intentionally, sometimes also merely instinctively, many women camouflaged their scientific interests and ambitions as well as their engagement in science by means of adopting more traditionally feminine roles, namely those of helpmates or assistants, sometimes also muses to male scientists, often fathers, brothers, or husbands, which fit the male-oriented image of science (Hoffmann 53-54, cf. Kohlstedt and Opitz 105-106). Appropriately feminine roles like these provided little or less target for those opposed to female education and participation in science. The adoption of such roles also explains why so many women remained invisible to the historical record for much of the past. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Donald L. Opitz discuss how women carefully negotiated their images and with that their position within the scientific communities of their respective time and place: “women in science viewed and presented themselves (often with deceptive, feminized modesty) as capable and talented historical agents,” they point out (106). In doing so, women scientists sometimes also contested popular images of themselves in self-representations, for instance, in portraits, engravings, photographs, autobiographical writing, and other forms of self-expression (Kohlstedt and Opitz 106). They invoked norms of femininity, at times representing themselves as “sympathetically conventional” or “flamboyantly unconventional” (Kohlstedt and Opitz 107). They created identities that they hoped would be beneficial for their work (Kohlstedt and Opitz 107). Drawing attention to the strategies used by many historical women to negotiate a place for themselves within the male-dominated world of science, Winterburn contends that Herschel understood the cultural expectations imposed upon her gender and was very careful to portray herself and her work in a way that made it acceptable for the scientific community of her day to support and encourage her role and her contributions (“Learned Modesty” 4). She always presented her work in astronomy as something imposed upon her, carefully distancing herself from personal ambition (Winterburn, Quiet Revolution 8-9). Winterburn explains that [i]n her letters, and especially her autobiographies, Caroline was very careful to present herself in a particular way. When she put her mind to it, the image she presented of her life and her path to success was that of an innocent, wide-eyed, but put-open heroine. She was a passive but grateful recipient of good fortunes. (Quiet Revolution 8-9) Following this reasoning, the domestic labels Herschel used to describe her astronomical work (‘minding the heavens’ and ‘sweeping the skies’) are certainly further proof of her ability to present her scientific activities in appropriately feminine ways that made it acceptable for the learned men of her time to welcome her participation and even acknowledge her contributions. Holmes explains that Herschel gave terms like ‘sweeping’ or ‘minding’ a certain “domestic familiarity,” using them in her letters to imply that she was “a sort of celestial housekeeper, brushing and dusting the stars to keep them in good state for her brother, a sort of heavenly Hausfrau” (Age of Wonder 116-117, italics in original). The ways in which Herschel presented herself in her letters and her memoirs Remembering Caroline Herschel in Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister 125 must be seen as part of this strategic submissiveness and subordination (to her brother) that she adopted to be accepted and appreciated by the male-dominated scientific community of her day, for instance when she described herself as “a well-trained puppydog” (Herschel ix). Following Winterburn’s reasoning as outlined above, the use of such language might then not only be interpreted as a sign of her excessive modesty but as a strategic tool for counteracting her gender-based exclusion and disregard by the masculine culture of science, to carve out a place for herself in the male-dominated world of science. While expressions like these are often still used to dismiss and downplay her abilities and achievements, as I have pointed out above with reference to Hoskin and Fara, they might be seen as a conscious and strategic form of female, perhaps even (pre-) feminist, resistance to patriarchal oppression and gender-based restrictions. Winterburn also draws attention to the ways in which her actions often undermined her own words. While Herschel usually announced her comet discoveries by letter, in the case of her eight and last comet she rode in the middle of the night to the observatory in Greenwich to tell the astronomer royal Neville Maskelyne personally about her finding (Hoskin, “Assistant” 439). Winterburn interprets this as a clear sign that she was eager to claim it (“Self-Presentation” 79). She always made sure that they would be acknowledged and accounted for to her, that her name would be attached to her discoveries. This does strongly contradict the assumption put forth by historians like Hoskin who claim that she did not care about her comet discoveries (Priestess 162). The language she used and the actions she took always show the specific tension she had to manage between her ambition of being acknowledged and accounted for and her need to appear non-ambitious (Winterburn, “Self-Presentation” 78-79). She developed the ability “to couch her astronomical work in ways that allowed it to be welcomed and accepted” (Winterburn, “Self-Presentation” 78-79) while training for her initially intended career as a concert singer. Winterburn explains that upon her move to Bath, Herschel had received lessons in self-presentation by hired tutors, among them women friends or acquaintances of William’s, in addition to lessons in singing and running the household that had been given to her by her brother (“Self-Presentation” 73-74). Hence, Winterburn continues, she was familiar with the expectations towards members of her sex, among them characteristics like “female modesty, self-depreciation and politeness” (“Learned Modesty” 4), and could “present herself in polite society as a performer and gentlewoman,” carefully managing her public appearance as well as her personal reputation (“Self-Presentation” 73-74, 75). Later, she was able to apply this knowledge to the public presentation of her role and work in the male-dominated world of eighteenthand nineteenth-century science (Winterburn, “Self-Presentation” 75). She used this strategically in her writings: According to Winterburn, this can be seen, for instance, in the letters by means of which she announced her comet discoveries to some of the learned men of science of her day (“Learned Modesty” 3). Here, her overly modest way of speaking and writing and the domestic metaphors she used to describe her science become apparent. A frequently cited example is the letter she wrote to Maskelyne upon the discovery of her first comet: “In consequence of the Friendship which I know to 126 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel exist between you and my Brother I venture to trouble you in his absence with the following imperfect account of a comet” (qtd. in Winterburn, “Learned Modesty” 1). It also becomes visible in the two portraits that exist of her, Winterburn explains: these “show Caroline demurely dressed, head covered, collar buttoned up to the chin with minimal clutter around her. In neither image are there any props or background imagery to indicate her importance or profession” (“Learned Modesty” 8). 3.2.3 A Damsel in Distress in Need of Rescue by Her Savior Prince: Herschel as the Cinderella of Astronomy Looking at Herschel’s reception history, one will notice immediately that she had further been victim to the long-prevailing cultural tendency to remember historical women more in terms of their feminine qualities than for their notable achievements and abilities. The male bias of traditional historiography is also evident in the frequent romanticization that her story has been subjected to. Throughout the centuries, historians and biographers have frequently adopted the Cinderella motif when talking about the GermanEnglish astronomer, Winterburn notes (“Self-Presentation” 70-71, Quiet Revolution 9). The origins of this comparison with Grimm’s now-famous fairy tale-figure must be ascribed to Herschel herself. In a letter to her niece Margaret Herschel dating September 24, 1838, she described herself as “the Cinderella of the family” (M. Herschel, Memoir 299, cf. Winterburn, Quiet Revolution 9). For Winterburn, this self-characterization was as a strategic choice by Herschel, one that fit “the prevailing mood” of the time when “the Brothers Grimm were collecting and recording their fairy tales” (Quiet Revolution 9). Winterburn understands Herschel’s use of the Cinderella motif as it neatly fits the kind of image and idea that she was so careful to create about herself, namely that of “an innocent, wide-eyed, but put-upon heroine […], a passive but grateful recipient of good fortunes” (Quiet Revolution 8-9). While she comprehends Herschel’s use of this motif in her own writing, what is stranger to Winterburn is that many writers telling her story have taken her “fairy-tale depiction of herself and her family at face value” (Quiet Revolution 8), reproducing and thus repeating it in their own works. It can still be found in the many accounts of her life written in the present day, as Winterburn points out (Quiet Revolution 9). The gender-stereotypical fairy tale-motif of a damsel in distress who must be rescued from her fate as domestic servant in her parents’ home by her knight in shining armor, in this case her older brother William, and who out of gratitude for her liberation dedicates her life to this prince charming and his career has followed Herschel through many biographical accounts of her life. Hoskin, undoubtedly the leading scholar on the Herschel siblings, 34 has significantly contributed to this idea and image of Herschel and her life. Since the late 1950s, he has published nine major biographical works about William and Caroline Herschel, which have strongly shaped the public perception of their stories. His reliance on these fairy tale-caricatures of Cinderella, the 34 Michael Lemonick, for instance, notes that Hoskin is “widely acknowledged to be the world’s foremost authority on the life of William Herschel and his family” (21-22). Remembering Caroline Herschel in Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister 127 wicked stepmother, and prince charming shines through in his accounts, most prominently perhaps in one of his latest biographies entitled Caroline Herschel: Priestess of the New Heavens (2013), in which he uses these motifs as chapter headings. 35 What has surprised me is that also some of the supposedly more feminist-oriented accounts of her life adopt these fairy tale-caricatures (see, for example, the biographical sketches produced by Patricia Fara and the biography written by Claire Brock). Hoskin notes that Herschel had a “grim childhood” (“Mortifications” 443). Though other reasons are certainly thinkable, for instance, the financial difficulties of the not well-off family, to him, the source of her misery was clearly her mother who planned to make her into a maid for the family. Hoskin insists that the “unsympathetic Anna” (“Assistant” 426) saw and treated her youngest daughter as “a household drudge” (Pioneers 3). According to him, she saw her “an enduring source of cheap help in the home” (“Assistant” 426). Hoskin describes Anna Herschel as a “slave-driver of a mother” (“Mortifications” 445). He portrays her as a villainous schemer and monstrous woman doing everything in her power to force her daughter into a life of domestic servitude in the Herschel household putting obstacles in her way so that she would have to stay with her for the rest of her life. He claims that Anna enjoyed having a maid of her own, and the only candidate was Caroline. Anna therefore conducted a long and well-thought-out campaign, whereby her daughter would acquire the skills that would be useful around the Herschel home, but would not be a plausible candidate for a more ambitious post that would allow her to make her escape. (“Mortifications” 443) It has often been claimed that the society of her day saw Herschel as unfit for the marriage market; she was regarded as unlikely to ever make a match due to her physical appearance. Hoskin notes that she was diminutive and disfigured from the various illnesses she had contracted as a child, smallpox, and later typhus (“Mortifications” 442). This assumption of her unmarriageability is based on Herschel’s own recollections of her life. In her memoirs, she recorded a frank warning her father once gave her about her prospects in terms of finding a husband and having a family of her own: “And I never forgot the caution my dear Father gave me; against all thoughts of marrying, saying as I was neither handsome nor rich it was not likely that any one [sic] would make me an offer, till perhaps when far advanced in life some old man might take me for my good qualities” (qtd. in Hoskin, “Mortifications” 442). To keep Caroline in the Herschel home, Anna Herschel apparently vetoed against her learning French, which, at the time, was a necessary requirement for becoming a governess (Hoskin, “Mortifications” 443). She also prevented her from learning more advanced needlework thus prohibiting her 35 Other works by Hoskin include William Herschel, Pioneer of Sidereal Astronomy (1959), William Herschel and the Construction of the Heavens (1963), The Herschel Partnership: As Viewed by Caroline (2003), Caroline Herschel’s Autobiographies (2003), The Herschels of Hanover (2007), Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline Herschel (2011), The Construction of the Heavens: William Herschel and Cosmology (2012), William and Caroline Herschel: Pioneers in Late 18th-Century Astronomy (2014). 134 The Historical Female Scientist in the Contemporary Anglophone Biographical Novel fact that Brown claims to have reproduced from time to time Caroline and William’s actual words exactly as they were written or spoken and have been recorded in surviving documents, though much of the dialogue had to be invented, of course (Brown 327). Nevertheless, the author is also keen to distance herself from the historiographical discourse of biography and its claims to factual truth. “In telling her story in The Stargazer’s Sister, I have made several deviations – some minor, some dramatic – from the historical record, sometimes for purposes of narrative design and sometimes out of an impulse to shape the material for purposes other than historical accuracy,” she notes insisting on her fictional privileges as a novelist (326). As was pointed out earlier on in this study, in biographical novels the acknowledgements become an important space in which authors negotiate the relationship between fact and fiction and admit the liberties they have taken, to reveal transparently some of the deviations made. In the present novel the poetic license that Brown has taken include the invention and exclusion of certain characters to deepen our understanding of her chosen subject’s character, the alteration or compression of historical events and dates to fit her century-spanning life into a coherent and compelling narrative, one that reveals the kind of message she wants to send to her twenty-first-century readers about Caroline’s life (Brown 326-327). The liberties she takes are the result of her self-image as a writer of fiction. The author does not see herself as a historian or biographer but emphasizes her role as an artist. She explains that “a historian seeking to understand the Herschels’ lives would approach their story very differently than I have done though we might depend on many of the same sources for information” (326). With all the additions, changes, and omissions she made in telling Caroline’s story in The Stargazer’s Sister Brown sought to capture the truth of what has felt to [her] from the first most intriguing and most moving about Caroline Herschel’s life: that she clearly loved her brother, that she admired him and served him and his endeavors with unquestionable loyalty and intelligence… and that her devotion was not without complexity and perhaps sometimes cost for her. (328, omission in original) Her choice of fiction thus seems to stem above all from a desire to get to the essence of her chosen subject proving Michael Lackey’s point that for writers of biographical fiction, fictional creation is more important than historical accuracy and biographical representation (Lackey, “Narrative Space” 2). She knows that authors of fiction aim for a different kind of truth, not biographical truth but “fictional truth,” as Lackey would put it (American Biographical Novel 35). Thanking Michael Hoskin, “perhaps the foremost scholar on the Herschels’ lives,” Brown expresses the hope that he would see the different kind of truth about Caroline Herschel’s life she attempted to create in the novel: “It is my hope that should he ever read this novel, he would appreciate the story’s deviations from the historical record and see in my changes to that record an altered but not unrecognizable truth” (330). It is undoubtedly Caroline Herschel’s story in which Brown is interested. Though Caroline clearly is the protagonist of The Stargazer’s Sister, it is not the story of her remarkable rise from its humble and unpromising beginnings as an unpaid household [Document text truncated for crawler view.]