Beguiling the Beauty

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Even though she has remarried, Christian’s stepmother is referred throughout the book as the dowager duchess and addressed as “Your Grace.” According to an edition of Debrett’s Peerage from the late nineteenth century, “A Widow who remarries loses any title or precedence she gained by her previous marriage. From this rule there is not any exception. Society, however, from pure motives of courtesy, sanctions the retention of former rank, and … permits ladies who have remarried to be addressed as though their titled husbands were living.”

Mary Anning, who lived in the first part of the nineteenth century, was a significant fossil collector and paleontologist. She is recognized by the Royal Society in 2010 as one of the ten most influential British women in the history of science. She had a more aristocratic counterpart in Barbara Hastings, Marchioness of Hastings and Baroness Grey de Ruthyn in her own right.