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作者:AndreaBarrett
出版时间:1996-11-17
书籍简介:
From the Author
After writing four novels in quick succession, I felt a longing to try something new – new voices, new approaches, new lengths and shapes," Barrett says about the writing of her book. "Ship Fever grew from that longing, with the collection as a whole evolving from the stories themselves, rather than from any preconceived notion. Although the stories differ from much of my earlier work because of their focus on history, writing them felt like a natural extension – I've always relied on research to uncover other people's lives and help me invent interesting situations. I knew as little, initially, about the Chinese doctors in The Middle Kingdom, or the elderly monk in The Forms of Water, as I did about these biologists.
My background is a little unusual for a writer; as a young woman, very much influenced by growing up on Cape Cod and by my love of the ocean and the natural world, I decided to be a biologist. I majored in biology in college, but not until a very brief stay in a graduate zoology program did I understand that I wasn't cut out to be a scientist. What I'd really wanted to be was a version of Darwin or Wallace; I wanted to see and describe and appreciate and name, not to analyze. Slowly I learned that those were the traits of a naturalist – a 19th-century profession. After I abandoned science, a brief but intense bout of studying history weaned me from the academic life for good; once more it was the stories of the field that captured me. I'm a slow learner, but at that point I finally turned to writing fiction. Still, science, particularly the history of science, never lost its fascination for me. I'm married to a scientist; many of my friends are scientists; for a while I edited medical and nursing books. And as I started writing these new stories I found myself driven back to the people and situations that had captivated me as a young woman.
What was it like to be Linnaeus, naming plants and animals for the first time? Or Mendel, ignored and despised? Those scientists I'd once glimpsed briefly at a marine-biology station – what might go on in their interior lives? What about the women I knew who had gone on to be successful scientists? If I'd been a doctor with a scientific mind in the 1840s, and was confronted with an epidemic disease caused by unknown factors, what would I have done?
Writing these tales, I felt as though I'd finally found a way to bring together science, history, and fiction – the three great, seemingly disparate, loves of my life. As if the long route I'd traveled in my writing, swinging wide through explorations of family life and contemporary love, China and a village lost to water, had led me back home after all.
作者简介:
From the Author
After writing four novels in quick succession, I felt a longing to try something new – new voices, new approaches, new lengths and shapes," Barrett says about the writing of her book. "Ship Fever grew from that longing, with the collection as a whole evolving from the stories themselves, rather than from any preconceived notion. Although the stories differ from much of my earlier work because of their focus on history, writing them felt like a natural extension – I've always relied on research to uncover other people's lives and help me invent interesting situations. I knew as little, initially, about the Chinese doctors in The Middle Kingdom, or the elderly monk in The Forms of Water, as I did about these biologists.
My background is a little unusual for a writer; as a young woman, very much influenced by growing up on Cape Cod and by my love of the ocean and the natural world, I decided to be a biologist. I majored in biology in college, but not until a very brief stay in a graduate zoology program did I understand that I wasn't cut out to be a scientist. What I'd really wanted to be was a version of Darwin or Wallace; I wanted to see and describe and appreciate and name, not to analyze. Slowly I learned that those were the traits of a naturalist – a 19th-century profession. After I abandoned science, a brief but intense bout of studying history weaned me from the academic life for good; once more it was the stories of the field that captured me. I'm a slow learner, but at that point I finally turned to writing fiction. Still, science, particularly the history of science, never lost its fascination for me. I'm married to a scientist; many of my friends are scientists; for a while I edited medical and nursing books. And as I started writing these new stories I found myself driven back to the people and situations that had captivated me as a young woman.
What was it like to be Linnaeus, naming plants and animals for the first time? Or Mendel, ignored and despised? Those scientists I'd once glimpsed briefly at a marine-biology station – what might go on in their interior lives? What about the women I knew who had gone on to be successful scientists? If I'd been a doctor with a scientific mind in the 1840s, and was confronted with an epidemic disease caused by unknown factors, what would I have done?
Writing these tales, I felt as though I'd finally found a way to bring together science, history, and fiction – the three great, seemingly disparate, loves of my life. As if the long route I'd traveled in my writing, swinging wide through explorations of family life and contemporary love, China and a village lost to water, had led me back home after all.