Darwinian obsessions: references to the theory of evolution in the novels of John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, and Hilary Mantel
Darwinian obsessions: references to the theory of evolution in the novels of John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, and Hilary Mantel

Summary/Abstract: This paper challenges the critical cliche´ that in recent fiction Darwinism replaces religion and that the scientific worldview is always in opposition to Christian belief. A close reading of three British novels written between the late 1960s and the early 1990s – namely, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, A.S. Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia (a short novel published together with her other novelette Conjugal Angel in the volume entitled Angels and Insects), and Hilary Mantel’s A Change of Climate demonstrates how Darwinian references themselves evolve over time. Three aspects of the novels are juxtaposed: primarily, the way they depict natural history in the 19th century – Darwin and his fellow naturalists – and thus create the myth of how modern science was born in Victorian England. Secondly, the paper establishes what the novelists in question understand by the word ‘science’ and whether for them natural science is or is not science proper. Thirdly and lastly, what is the novelists’ attitude to the alleged conflict between Christian belief and the theory of evolution. In the quarter century dividing Fowles’s novel from Mantel’s much changes in the way each of these problems is handled. In

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