Case study: Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures

As revealed in her interview with Greg Johnson, Oates was clear about what she wanted to achieve – the imaginative truth of Norma Jeane’s life – and why she needed to weave fact and fiction to meet her goals – because biography alone was not enough to capture the complexities of the life, a notion supported by Marcus in Auto/biographical Discourses who argues that ‘very few critics would demand that auto/biographical truth should be literally verifiable – this would, after all, undermine the idea that the truth of the self is more complex than fact.’271 _{It seemed wise to turn to other established authors of texts featuring ‘real’} subjects that are considered to be fiction to see what insights they were able to provide into the creative processes used to successfully work at this intersection. The following text and author was chosen, along with Oates, as an exemplar of this: Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier.  

Remarkable Creatures is a work of historical fiction focusing on the life of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Phillpots in Lyme Regis. In the novel’s postscript, Chevalier discusses the “real”                                                                                                                          

269_{Gudmundsdottir,  Borderlines,  185.}   270_{Gudmundsdottir,  Borderlines,  200.}   271_{Marcus,  Autobiographical  Discourses,  3.}  

Mary Anning, the “real” Elizabeth Philpotts, and a little about other characters in the novel that are based on real people. She includes a brief biographical overview of Mary, including where she lived and when, and how and when she died, along with scientific papers that mention her by name, and other information such as that she never married. The postscript also contains a disclaimer of sorts:  

Remarkable Creatures is a work of fiction, but many of the people existed, and events such as Colonel Birch’s auction and the Geological Society meeting where Conybeare talked about the plesiosaur did take place. And Mary did indeed write at the bottom on a scientific paper she had copied out: “When I write a paper there shall not be but one preface.” Sadly she never did write her own scientific paper.272  

Like Oates, Chevalier makes a point of mentioning examples of the facts that underpin the text. In the postscript, Chevalier comments upon the writing process in terms of weaving history, biography and fiction in order to produce the work:

Twenty-first-century attitudes towards time and our expectations of story are very different from the shape of Mary Anning’s life. She spent day after day, year after year, doing the same thing on the beach. I have taken the events of her life and condensed them to fit into a narrative that is not stretched beyond the reader’s patience. Hence events, while in order, do not always coincide exactly with actual dates and time spans. Plus, of course, I made up plenty. For instance, while there was gossip about Mary and Buckland and Mary and Birch, there was no proof. This is where only a novelist can step in.273  

Chevalier acknowledges the narrative shaping that is necessary to create a good story, one that will be interesting and engaging to read, as well as the gaps that provide perfect

opportunities for an author to step in with imaginative intervention. Chevalier’s approach fits nicely with the idea championed by Lynch that innovation and creativity can expand the potential of documents of life. Chevalier provides a list of resources including books,

scientific papers, museums, experts, sources both primary and secondary and thanks those who contributed their knowledge on Anning, “monster hunting” and the region, showing the wealth of research conducted and source materials drawn upon in order to bring Anning to life. Where the documents failed or faltered, providing information but not verifiable fact, such as the rumours about Anning’s relationships with Buckland and Birch, Chevalier the researcher and biographer left off and Chevalier the creative writer and historical novelist took over.

Chevalier has featured real people in her historical fiction before, such as Johannes Vermeer and William Blake, but Remarkable Creatures was the first of her works in which real people took centre stage. When asked in an interview with Felicity Librie for the Fiction Writers Review if writing about a real person was a constraint, Chevalier replied that ‘the advantage                                                                                                                          

272_{Tracy  Chevalier,  Remarkable  Creatures  (London:  HarperCollins  Publishers,2009)  351.}   273_{Chevalier,  Remarkable  Creatures,  352.}  

is that you don’t have to make it up […] I had the skeleton structure of her life, where she was at more or less any given period; she didn’t move around much, and lived in Lyme Regis all her life. There were highlights of her life, so the peaks of the story are built in, and that’s great.’274 _{Of the disadvantages, she stated that ‘those peaks don’t always happen the} way we as readers would like them to. I had to fudge the chronology a little bit, more in this book than in other books.’275 This matches the approach recommended by Cline and Angier in the Arvon Book of Life Writing aimed at offering advice to burgeoning life writing

practitioners, that the verifiable facts of the life provide the foundation for a biography or biographical fiction. Chevalier also noted the liberation she felt once she dispensed with dates after the realisation that they were not essential and made the narrative drag.276 She retained chronology, but skipped periods of time in which not much happened in order to maintain pace. Whether biographer or novelist, a life needs to be packaged into an accessible, engaging form, therefore selection and omission are essential, much like the sorting and sifting process explained by Duffin in “Turning Talking into Writing” regarding the capturing of the life story.  

The above has served to illustrate the often shared processes and practices of life story researchers, biographers and fiction writers, especially historical fiction writers who are well versed in the rigours of research as well as achieving the fertile blend necessary for the successful rendering of a life. The final genre categorisation of the texts may differ, but all combine fact with techniques of fictionalisation to varying degrees to achieve the desired effect – to illuminate a life.