Ammonite, is not the sort of woman I came across much as a child of the 1970s, even in fiction. But maybe because I grew up in Dorset, her county, a children’s book of her life, Mary Anning’s Treasures, lurked in the school library and I lapped it up.Anning was a phenomenon.
One of 10 children, she was dirt poor and excluded by the scientific community because she was a woman and a Dissenter. She nevertheless made fossil discoveries that changed people’s understanding of prehistory and challenged the prevailing Creationist view.
By the time she died in 1847, at 47, of breast cancer, she was famous throughout Europe. She was still impecunious, of course, obliged to sell fossils to tourists in her shop in Lyme Regis.Winslet is wonderful –.
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