Biography is never an easy task. It’s impossible to fully know someone in the past.
When biography is done well, however, it rewards both the biographer and the reader. Learning how people in the past reacted to challenges and joys can enlighten us all.
“Finding Wonders,” by Jeannine Atkins of Whately, is one of the most entrancing biographies I have read of late.
It is actually a triple biography, chronicling the lives of three girls in the past who ended up devoting their lives to science. It is geared toward readers age 10 and up. I’m definitely “up,” and I loved it.
The first subject Atkins tackles is Maria Merian (1647-1717), a German-born naturalist who was one of the first people to discover the metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies. She moved from a conventional life—painting pretty nature watercolors—to a life of scientific adventure.
Atkins moves on to Mary Anning (1799-1847). An English girl, Anning discovered her first fossil before she was a teenager and went on to discover many more fossils, which she sold to collectors and museums.
Atkins’s final subject is the only one of whom I had heard, American astronomer Maria Mitchell (1818-1889). Born to a Quaker family on Nantucket, Mitchell began studying the stars with her father but eventually surpassed him as a technician and scientist.
Gaining fame (and a prize from the king of Denmark) for discovering a comet in 1847, she went on to teach for many years at Vassar College. There she showed generations of young women that science could be women’s work.
Atkins notes at the end of her book that she didn’t have full biographical information about her subjects. All three were famous in their day, but although Mitchell is well documented Merian and Anning are now a bit obscure.
The author explains that she solved the problem of the unknowable in a couple of ways. First, she studied materials about the eras in which her subjects lived. She thus situated her biographies with word pictures that add texture to the lives she recounts in terms of architecture, fashion, and culture.
Second, she wrote her book in verse. This choice gave her a sense of freedom from strict fact (although she is careful to explain at the book’s end where she deviated from what is known historically).
“As if working with raw silk,” she explains in her afterword, “I tried to honor the character of what I was given, while spinning out facts into verse.”
The result is a delightful book that conveys the sense of wonder its young heroines must have felt while making their discoveries. It seems destined to inspire young readers to seek wonders of their own.
Tinky Weisblat is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook” and “Pulling Taffy.” Visit her website, www.TinkyCooks.com