Rebecca Stott
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Rebecca Stott (born 1964) is a British academic, broadcaster, novelist and a professor at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of two historical thrillers, Ghostwalk (2007) and The Coral Thief (2009), a biography of Charles Darwin, Darwin and the Barnacle (2003) and an epic history of Darwin's predecessors called Darwin's Ghosts. Stott lives and works in London and Norwich. She has three children. She has begun a third novel set in contemporary London.
Contents
Early life
Stott was born at Cambridge in 1964. She was raised in Brighton in a community of fundamentalist Christians known as the Exclusive Brethren. The Exclusive Brethren are a small branch of the Plymouth Brethren and, unlike their larger counterpart "Open Brethren" are separatists in practice.[1][2][3] After a schism in the 1970s, the Stotts left the sect.[1] Stott claims her love of books liberated her from 'the paranoid, black-and-white view of the world [she] grew up in.'[2]
Education and career
Stott read English and Art History at the University of York, then a Master of Arts and a Ph.D also at York.[3] She taught at the University of York, the University of Leeds, then Anglia Ruskin University at Cambridge before being appointed to a chair at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.[3]
Novels
Stott's atmospheric debut novel, Ghostwalk was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award and the Society of Authors First Novel Award. Lydia Brooke is called upon to be the ghostwriter of a book on Sir Isaac Newton's alchemy.[1] Brooke begins to think that the death of the book's author, Cambridge historian Elizabeth Vogelsang, may somehow relate to a series of unsolved seventeenth-century murders. The novel, an innovative mix of fiction and non-fiction, blends seventeenth-century accounts of plague, glassmaking, alchemy and theories of optics with a contemporary plot involving quantum physics and animal rights campaigns. The New York Times compared it to the works of Borges and Edgar Allan Poe.
Stott's second novel, The Coral Thief, set in 1815 post-Napoleonic France, is a thriller that explores religion, rationalism, and evolutionary theory while its hero, a medical student, becomes drawn into a daring jewel heist. It was serialised on Radio Four's Book at Bedtime in January 2010.[4]
Non-Fiction
Before 2003 Stott published a number of academic books including monographs or collections of essays on Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (with Simon Avery) and other aspects of Victorian culture. Since 2003 her non-fiction work has been more experimental and narrative-driven whilst still scholarly and archive-based as she has become concerned with crossing discipline boundaries and with writing for audiences beyond the academy. Darwin and the Barnacle (Faber, 2003) documented a little-explored eight-year period of Darwin's life in which he became obsessed with breaking the riddle of a single aberrant barnacle species he had found in a conch shell on a beach in Southern Chile and which led him to complete an enormous work of barnacle taxonomy while his revolutionary work on natural selection lay locked away in a drawer. In 2012 she published an epic account of the history of evolution before Darwin which documents a 2,200 year history, a tale of heretics and free thinkers who were prepared to risk public censure or even imprisonment by asking questions that challenged religious orthodoxies. Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists was published in the UK by Bloomsbury Publishing and in the US by Spiegel and Grau in May 2012. Reviewers have praised Stott's Darwin's Ghosts for its writing style, its attention to character and place, for the ambition of its historical range and philosophical reach and for its revelation of the long and intensely dangerous history of evolution as an idea.
Selected Works
- The Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale, 1992
- Tennyson, 1996
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (with Simon Avery), 2003
- Oyster, 2003
- Theatres of Glass: The Woman Who Brought the Sea to the City, 2003
- Darwin and the Barnacle, 2003.
- Ghostwalk, 2007
- The Coral Thief, 2009
- Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists, 2012.
