Biography: Pity the biographer who, having completed the second draft of a book close on 400 pages long, gets a phone call to say that not one but a further 10 box files of material have been found, in this case, on top of a cupboard in the Natural History Museum in London.
In 1998, Karolyn Schindler took her then nine-year-old son to the museum where they stared in fascination at the skull of an extinct elephant said to have given rise to the Cyclops legend. Displayed alongside it was the diary of Dorothea Bate who, in 1901, at the age of 22, had gone off to Cyprus on a lone fossil hunt.
Schindler was intrigued. Who was this valiant, enterprising young woman? Her immediate researches revealed that though Dorothea was a revered expert on fossils, her name did not appear in any biographical dictionary. Thanks to Schindler, that omission has been rectified: there is now an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Schindler has written the excellent. Discovering Dorothea.
The story starts in Wexford where Dorothea's father, Henry Bate, was born, the son of the ChiefOfficer of Ballygeary Coast Guard Station. Henry joined the British Army, married and later had three children of which Dorothea was the quiet, introspective one, overshadowed by an older, talented sister who married well and by a younger brother whose bride-to-be - a young, money-conscious widow - demanded he come with a dowry, thus depriving Dorothea of anything that might have come her way at a later stage.
This was all in the future, however, when Dorothea, at the age of 19,decided she wanted to pursue her all-consuming interest in birds and bones. She talked her way into the National History Museum at a time when it was unheard of to let females into such a male preserve. Initially, the curator of birds, Bowdler Sharpe, had rejected her pleas to work in the museum. But as a father of 10 daughters, one of whom ran her own entomological agency, he had the wisdom to take a risk with Dorothea who, left to her own devices as a child , had roamed the woods and caves near her homes in Wales and later Gloucestershire, emerging into womanhood as a self-taught ornithologist and a very confident one at that.
Later, a chance invitation to stay with family friends brought her to Cyprus where she began a search for fossils in the limestone caves of the island, piecing together bits of teeth, jaw and tusks until she was able to show the existence of a pigmy elephant no higher than four feet as well as a tiny hippo thought to have drifted across the sea from Palestine on a mat of tangled grass.
Dorothea's work took her to Sudan, Syria and Egypt, among other countries, sometimes funded by grants from the Royal Society though it wasn't until she was in her 60s that a sort of living was found for her in the unique museum in Tring, north of Aylesbury, famed for its collection of dressed fleas, kitted out, it was said, by nuns in Spain! She never married but carried over her role of emotional support first to her mother and later to her sister. She died of cancer - it is thought - in 1950, her ashes scattered over Golders Green Cemetery in London.
This is a work of love arduously pursued for, at the end of the day, the biographer did not have much personal material at her disposal: Dorothea stopped keeping a diary very early on and many of her letters and papers were destroyed when her sister's house burned down. Inevitably, therefore, words like maybe and possibly occur regularly throughout the book but this need not detract from the story of a distinguished life quietly lived. An added bonus is that the book includes 17 pages of bibliography and sources.
Mary Russell is the author of The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt
Discovering Dorothea : The Life of the Pioneering Fossil-hunter Dorothea Bate By Karolyn Schindler, Harper Collins, 390pp. £25