Rebecca Stott is a British academic, broadcaster, novelist and a professor at the University of East Anglia

University of East Anglia

The University of East Anglia is a public research university based in Norwich, United Kingdom. It was established in 1963, and is a founder-member of the 1994 Group of research-intensive universities.-History:...

. She is the author of two historical thrillers, Ghostwalk (2007) and The Coral Thief (2009) a biography of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

, Darwin and the Barnacle (2003) and an epic history of Darwin's predecessors called Darwin's Ghosts. Stott lives and works in Cambridge. She has three children. She has begun a third novel set in contemporary and Elizabethan London.

Early life

Stott was born at Cambridge in 1964. She was raised in Brighton in a community of fundamentalist Christians called the Exclusive Brethren, a branch of the Plymouth Brethren

Plymouth Brethren

The Plymouth Brethren is a conservative, Evangelical Christian movement, whose history can be traced to Dublin, Ireland, in the late 1820s. Although the group is notable for not taking any official "church name" to itself, and not having an official clergy or liturgy, the title "The Brethren," is...

, a cult who kept complete separation from the rest of the world in order to prepare themselves for the Rapture

Rapture

The rapture is a reference to the "being caught up" referred to in 1 Thessalonians 4:17, when the "dead in Christ" and "we who are alive and remain" will be caught up in the clouds to meet "the Lord"....

 or the Second Coming

Second Coming

In Christian doctrine, the Second Coming of Christ, the Second Advent, or the Parousia, is the anticipated return of Jesus Christ from Heaven, where he sits at the Right Hand of God, to Earth. This prophecy is found in the canonical gospels and in most Christian and Islamic eschatologies...

. After a schism in the 1970s, the Stotts left the sect. Stott claims her love of books liberated her from 'the paranoid, black-and-white view of the world [she] grew up in.'

Education and career

Stott read English and Art History at the University of York

University of York

The University of York , is an academic institution located in the city of York, England. Established in 1963, the campus university has expanded to more than thirty departments and centres, covering a wide range of subjects...

, then a Master of Arts and a Ph.D also at York. She taught at the University of York, the University of Leeds

University of Leeds

The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...

, then Anglia Ruskin University

Anglia Ruskin University

Anglia Ruskin University is one of the largest universities in Eastern England, United Kingdom, with a total student population of around 30,000.-History:...

 at Cambridge before being appointed to a chair at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Stott now teaches half of the year at the University of East Anglia and works the other as a freelance writer. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

.

Novels

Stott's atmospheric debut novel, Ghostwalk was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award and the Society of Authors First Novel Award. A ghost story

Ghost story

A ghost story may be any piece of fiction, or drama, or an account of an experience, that includes a ghost, or simply takes as a premise the possibility of ghosts or characters' belief in them. Colloquially, the term can refer to any kind of scary story. In a narrower sense, the ghost story has...

, historical thriller and a love story, it relates the story of a woman, Lydia Brooke, called upon to be the ghostwriter

Ghostwriter

A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person. Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written...

 of a book on Sir Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...

's alchemy

Alchemy

Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...

. 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

Optics

Optics is the branch of physics which involves the behavior and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behavior of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light...

 with a contemporary plot involving quantum physics and animal rights

Animal rights

Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of non-human animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings...

 campaigns. The New York Times compared it to the works of Borges and Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

.

Stott's second novel, The Coral Thief, set in 1815 post-Napoleonic France, is a thriller that explores religion, rationalism

Rationalism

In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...

, 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.

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 complete an enormous work of barnacle taxonomy while his revolutionary work on natural selection lay locked away in a drawer. She has now completed 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. It is called Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists and will be published in in the UK by Bloomsbury and in the US by Spiegel and Grau in May 2012.

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

• Ghostwalk, 2007

• The Coral Thief, 2009

• Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists, 2012.

External links

• Rebecca Stott's Homepage