There are some titles that draw me in immediately and I’m a sucker for this one – it’s so specific, so… vegetal. Andrea Barrett is rather an unusual writer who often writes about the history of science, particularly the nineteenth-century world of natural history. This story is one of my favourites by her, intertwining the story of Gregor Mendel’s experiments with peas, a terrible accident in which a young girl’s grandfather kills a man, and the same girl’s later life as the wife of a rather insufferable genetics lecturer. Scientific ideas are more than just the background to Barrett’s stories; she is deeply knowledgeable about the culture of scientific experiment and the way that human concerns shape what is studied and how, and that the person gets the credit isn’t always the person who deserves it.
First published in The Missouri Review, 1994. Collected in Ship Fever, WW Norton & Co, 1996. Available to read online via Project Muse here
A Personal Anthology 