Everybody knows about Charles Darwin, and many know about others in his family, from Erasmus Darwin and Tom Wedgwood, the first photographer, to composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and poet and radical John Cornford, the first Briton to be killed in the Spanish Civil War.
But when Charles and Emma Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter, another Emma Darwin, tried to root her new novel in that history, the conflict between her complex heritage, and her own identity as a writer, became a battle that nearly killed her.
This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin takes the reader on a writer’s journey through the Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton clan, as seen through the lens of Emma’s struggle.
Along the way, her wry, witty and honest memoir becomes a brave book about failure – and, above all, a book about writing and how stories are told.
This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin by Emma Darwin is published on 12 February, 2019
Emma Darwin writes a regular column in Historia as the
inimitable agony aunt Dr Darwin.
