Difficult families also feature prominently in the short stories.

Sarah Anne eventually meets a widow named Catherine Pierce who is as intelligent and scientifically inclined as Sarah Anne. When he marries Juliet, an elegant young woman with more manners than brains, Christopher’s disdain of his sister’s intelligence and willfulness increases. Sarah Anna is a spinster who had been educated along with her brother by their naturalist father, but not allowed to be intelligent otherwise: “Sarah Anne inherited her father’s brains but Christopher inherited everything else, including his father’s friends.” The old naturalists tolerate and are amused by her, Linnaeus is a distant pen pal who discounts her theories, and her brother just fears that she’s going to be his responsibility for the rest of his life. These themes are even stronger in “Rare Bird,” which is set in the mid-eighteenth century. Antonia’s grandfather had met and befriended Mendel, and even had a letter that Mendel had written and given to him, and she recounts the story in full to a young man named Sebastian, one of Richard’s favorite students. Haunting these stories is the feeling of isolation: what happens to intelligent women in a world that values only male intelligence? In “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” a woman with connections to Mendel takes back her story from her husband, a university professor who mangled the story of the abbot’s research every semester. This story deals with regret and mortality, a theme encapsulated by Linnaeus saying, “The death of many whom I have induced to travel has turned my hair gray, and what have I gained? A few dried plants, accompanied by great anxiety, unrest, and care.” This is the story he features in prominently, but he exists only in references and letters in “Rare Bird” and “Birds with No Feet.” Barrett also writes about women who are too big for the gender roles society creates for them, especially when they approach middle age. His last pupil, Rotherham, is the one who will survive Linnaeus. Many of those pupils or “disciples” are dead, having suffered misadventure in pursuit of science. In “The English Pupil,” an elderly Linnaeus, who suffers from dementia and barely recognizes his own family, remembers his pupils and their adventures throughout the years. The character of Linnaeus, a naturalist famous for categorizing species of flora and fauna, is woven through at least three stories.

Beyond science, Barrett also plays with ideas of feminism, broken families unhappily stitched together by marriage, and rivalries between naturalists. Several of the stories are set in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, and some in the twentieth. A few of the stories fall into the genre of historical fiction and all of them draw inspiration from Barrett’s training in science and the history of science. Ship Fever (1996) is a collection of seven short stories and one novella by Andrea Barrett.

Ship fever andrea barrett summary