Reporting from London — Tracy Chevalier sits in the Victorian grandeur of London's Museum of Natural History next to the skeletal remains of a giant eye, the shape and size of a pineapple ring.
"It's so big it's kind of funny. . . . It's like a cartoon. But that's often the quality of dinosaurs. Everything about them seems to be exaggerated, their teeth, their size, their claws . . . ," says the author of "Girl With a Pearl Earring."
The eye belongs to a plesiosaur and was found in the English seaside town of Lyme Regis in the early 1800s by amateur fossil hunter and seller Mary Anning -- the subject of Chevalier's new novel, "Remarkable Creatures."
From the moment Anning is struck by lightning as a baby -- "which people said made her strange and extra-bright" -- it is clear she is marked for greatness, says Chevalier.
In the book, working-class Anning meets the middle-class unmarried Elizabeth Philpot, and through their mutual love for fossils the two strike up a strange camaraderie.
Anning, who is thought to be the inspiration for the tongue-twister "She Sells Sea Shells on the Sea Shore," is on the hunt for what she believes to be a giant crocodile similar to one (later named an ichthyosaurus) she found in 1811 when she was 12, which later rocked the scientific world.
Then one fateful day, she finds herself staring into the eye of the strangest beast she's ever encountered.
"The eye is enormous," says Chevalier, her voice echoing around the Richard Owen- designed "cathedral of nature," while a dimly lighted statue of Charles Darwin looks on from its rear.
"When you look at it, you realize the minute her and Elizabeth saw it they must have known it couldn't be a crocodile."
Professor Philip Davis of Liverpool University, author of "Why Victorian Literature Still Matters," said there are two types of writing about the 19th century.
"There's the patronizing stuff," he says. "Victorian repression, covering up piano legs, that kind of nonsense which wants to make us seem, oh, so cool and progressive."
However, he says the 19th century comes to life when writers see how it is the foundation of our modern life in "all its questionings, discoveries and innovations."
He said the fascination with writing about the time is that "the problems and conflicts of the modern world began there -- in matters of faith and science, family and women's rights, vocation and economics."
