by Tracy Chevalier (2009)
In the windswept coastal town of Lyme Regis, Mary Anning hunts for sea monsters in the jagged cliffs. When she uncovers the fossilized skeleton of an unknown creature, she rocks the scientific world. Alongside Elizabeth Philpot, an intelligent spinster with an eye for fossilized fish, Mary challenges the scientific establishment of 19th-century Britain.
Sarah Perry
Set in 1890s England, The Essex Serpent follows London widow Cora Seaborne. Following the death of her abusive husband, Cora decamps to rural Essex with an interest in natural history. When rumors spread that a mythical winged monster has returned from the coastal marshes, Cora forms an intense bond with the local parish vicar Will Ransome.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Born in 1800 into extraordinary wealth, Alma Whittaker inherits her father's passion for the natural sciences. An independent woman with a voracious mind, she becomes an extraordinary botanist specializing in mosses, tracing the mysteries of evolution and desire across nineteenth-century Philadelphia, London, and the South Pacific.
Pip Williams
Growing up beneath the sorting table of the original Oxford English Dictionary in Victorian Oxford, young Esme collects discarded slips of words relating to women's daily labor and domestic lives.
Margaret A. Oppenheimer
"Born Betsy Bowen into grinding poverty, the woman who became Eliza Jumel was raised in a brothel, indentured as a servant, and confined to a workhouse when her mother was in jail. Yet by the end of her life, "Madame Jumel" was one of America's richest women, with servants of her own, a New York mansion and Saratoga Springs summer home, a major art collection, and several hundred acres of land. During her remarkable rise, she acquired a fortune from her first husband--a French merchant--and almost lost it to her second--notorious vice president Aaron Burr. Divorcing Burr amid lurid charges of adultery, Jumel lived on to the age of 90, astutely managing her property and public persona. After her death, a titanic battle over her estate went all the way to the United States Supreme Court--twice. Family members told of a woman who earned the gratitude of Napoleon I and shone at the courts of Louis XVIII and Charles X. Claimants to her estate painted a different picture: of a prostitute, the mother of George Washington's illegitimate son, a wife who defrauded her husband and perhaps even plotted his death. Eliza Jumel's real story--so unique that it surpasses any invention--has yet to be told, until now. "--