"The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone." – Mary Anning, in a letter
FIELD NOTES – Dr. Eleanor Hartley LOCATION: The Quarry of Names, Field of Letters; the Masons' Terraces SUBJECT: Where stones come from When the Gate accepts a name, a stone has to be broken for her. It comes from the Quarry, where the river has cut the Field of Letters down to its bones. The cliff is blue-grey lias, layer on layer, the same stone as the coast of Dorset, and it is made of lives. Every layer holds stones. Very few of them have names. They are the women who were never written down at all – the washerwoman, the wet-nurse, the girl who carried water up the hill every day for forty years, the woman who set the village's broken bones and was paid in eggs – pressed flat under the weight of everything that came after, and kept by it. The Field of Letters, it turns out, is not made of literature. Literature is a thin layer on top. Underneath it is everyone. Mary Anning keeps the Quarry. In life she found the creatures that rewrote the history of the earth in the cliffs at Ly...
From the lore of Cité des Dames.