conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Mary, Anning, Elizabeth with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Remarkable Creatures'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Remarkable Creatures
  As Mr Lyell was speaking, the Frenchman squatted by the ichthyosaurus and run a finger up and down its ribs, which were almost complete and beautifully spaced like iron railings. I could no longer just sit while he was crouching with his thighs so near to me. I picked up a blade, kneeled by the ichie's jaw and begun to scrape at the shale clinging to it.
  I paused, my hand on the ichie's jaw. So this poor specimen would go to a rich man's house, to be ignored amongst all the silver and gold. I could have wept. "So is he –" I nodded at Monsieur Prévost "– going to tell Monsieur Cuvier that the plesiosaurus isn't a fake? That it really does have a small head and a long neck and I weren't just putting two animals together?"
  Monsieur Prévost glanced up from his study of the plesie with a keen look that made me think he understood more English than he spoke.
  Mr Lyell smiled at me. "There is no need, Miss Anning. Baron Cuvier is fully convinced of the specimen, even without Monsieur Prévost having seen it. He has had a great deal of correspondence about the plesiosaurus with various of your champions: Reverend Buckland, Conybeare, Mr Johnson, Mr Cumberland—"
  Constant Prévost got to his feet, dusted off his knees and spoke to Mr Lyell. "Monsieur Prévost would like to know if you have a buyer for the plesiosaurus," he explained. "If not, he would like to purchase it for the museum in Paris."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The men wanted to see more, so I had to fetch the Days to dig out that ichie while I took them to the Ammonite Graveyard at Monmouth Beach, and on along to Pinhay Bay to hunt crinoids. Only once they'd left to go to Weymouth and to Portland were I finally free to return to the plesie. I would have to clean it fast, for Monsieur Prévost planned to leave for France in ten days. I would be working day and night to get it ready, but it would be worth it. That was how this trade was: for months every day would be just like the last, but for the changes in weather, with me hunting upon beach. Then along come three monsters and two strangers and suddenly I would have to stay up all hours to finish preparing a specimen.
  Maybe it were because I was in the workshop all the time till the plesie was done and the men gone that I didn't find out until everyone else in Lyme already knew. It took Mam shouting at me from her perch at the table one morning to get me outside. "What, Mam?" I grumbled as I wiped my hair from my eyes, leaving clay on my forehead.
  Bessy turned, and grunted when she saw me. I had to grab her arm to keep her from ducking inside. Bessy rolled her eyes. "What you want?"
  Bessy had never liked me, so it were no surprise what she was saying. I just had to work out if it were true. I tried to read her face as she spoke. She looked bothered, and nervous and angry. Nor would she look at me direct, but kept turning her head from side to side, as if hoping someone would come and save her from me.
  I went back along Coombe Street, but when I reached Cockmoile Square I didn't go over to Mam behind her table. Instead I turned into Bridge Street, crossed the square past the Assembly Rooms and the Three Cups, and started up Broad Street. If I were going to be kept away, I would hear it direct from the Philpots rather than from Bessy.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Joseph Anning became a full-time upholsterer in 1825, married in 1829, and had three children. Apparently Mary Anning did not get on with his wife. Joseph managed to achieve the respectable life he craved, overseeing parish relief and becoming a church warden.
  Colonel Thomas James Birch became Thomas James Bosvile in 1824, when he inherited the title and the family estate in Yorkshire. He died in 1829.
  William Buckland did find a woman to marry him, in 1825 – she was sitting opposite him in a coach and reading a volume of Cuvier. He continued to eat his way through the animal kingdom, and to try to reconcile geology with his religious beliefs. He later became Dean of Westminster School, but towards the end of his life he suffered from mental illness and had to be placed in an asylum.
  Jane Austen visited Lyme in September 1804, and there is no reason why she and Margaret Philpot could not have been in the Assembly Rooms at the same time. Indeed, she did meet Richard Anning, for she went to his shop to have him give her a quote on fixing the broken lid of a chest. According to a letter she wrote to her sister, he charged far too much, and she took her business elsewhere.
  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. That is where only a novelist can step in.