ABSTRACT
The historical framework of the neo-Victorian novel here no longer performs a nostalgic as, rather, a cautionary purpose in pinpointing the moment of transition between shifting models of evolution, the clash of which raised vital questions about the ethics of science. It is this concern with ethics which shapes the encounters between scientists in contemporary neo-Darwinian literature by women. Anning's discovery of ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterosaur specimens challenged religious dogma and became key to extinction theory, influencing Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology in turn inspired Darwin on his Beagle voyage. The work of Cuvier is primordial, his theory of catastrophe brilliant. The pornographic gaze was also at evidence in Cuvier's autopsy report. While Barrett's novel takes its inspiration from the various Arctic recovery missions undertaken in the late 1840s and 1850s to find traces of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition of 1845, its title manifestly echoes Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle.
