Both women are cramped by gender expectations offering them little fulfillment, even if Mary has rejected the outer trappings of conventional femininity. They couldn’t be more different - Mary is sturdy, indifferent to her appearance and hardened by solitude Charlotte is corseted, buttoned and bonneted, enfeebled by a patronizing husband who expects her to be her bright and clever self without really bothering to know her.
The two women at first regard one another in wary silence. Sold to provide food and clothing for the family, that specimen now sits in the British Museum in London, with the name of a male scientist on its display cabinet. She inherited her sharp eye for interesting rock formations from her father, making her most notable find at age 11, with a magnificent ichthyosaurus fossil. Under a wintry sky that seems almost a permanent shade of gray, Mary combs the windswept shores at the foot of her Dorset village for fossils and shells to sell in the shopfront of a modest family home she shares with her elderly widowed mother Molly ( Gemma Jones, wonderful). This is a purely speculative fiction inspired by passionate letters exchanged between various 19th century women, yet every moment of its bracing intimacy feels elevated by authenticity.
He takes as his jumping off point a historical figure about whom relatively little is known, Mary Anning (Winslet), a working class paleontologist whose achievements were obscured by the well-heeled boys’ club of science at that time. With no diminishment of the indelible sense of place that defined his first film, Lee trades the rugged farmlands of his native Yorkshire for the equally forbidding rocky beaches of Lyme Regis on England’s South West coast in the 1840s.
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