The Estate of Brenda Maddox

A rich and exuberant group biography of the first geologists, the people who were first to excavate from the layers of the world its buried history. The individual stories of these first geologists, their hope and fears, triumphs and disappointments, the theological, philosophical and scientific debates their findings provoked, and the way that as a group, they were to change irrevocably and dramatically our understanding of the world is told by Brenda Maddox with a storyteller's skill and a fellow scientist's understanding. The effect is absorbing, revelatory and strikingly original.

Why are kangaroos found only in Australia? What created the Niagara Falls? Why did horses have to be introduced to the Americas? How were volcanoes created? Why are the rock formations of the Alps so twisted? Did the Biblical Flood really happen?

These were the kinds of far-reaching questions that a 19th century club of gentlemen scientists set themselves the task of answering – and their ground-breaking discoveries shaped the way we understand the world today. Based in a gaslit debating chamber by the River Thames, members of the Geological Society would roam the world to gather fossils, bones and rocks as evidence for their theories. With technological advances opening up the possibilities of science to the masses, geology quickly became the most popular and dynamic of the new sciences, and the Society’s findings were delivered to an eager public.

But the Geological Society found itself at the centre of an intense debate that rocked society to its core. If a geologist could prove that the world was formed billions of years before human life emerged, then a man could deny the hand of God in creating the world. For some members of the Society, these geological revelations would enable them to develop yet more radical theories – Charles Darwin based his theory of evolution on the geological work done by his mentor Charles Lyell. But for others, including Lyell, the full implications of their work were a profoundly frightening prospect. Although he gave Darwin his public support and recognised his own role as the ‘missing link’ in the younger man’s research, Lyell was nonetheless a reluctant evolutionist who would struggle for the rest of his life to reconcile himself to the damage done to his religious beliefs.

READING THE ROCKS tells the compelling story of Lyell, Darwin, and the other key geologists of the era: men who first learned how to read the layers of rock and mud to tell a new history of the world, and who in doing so precipitated a severe crisis of faith and had as wide an impact as the ideas of Copernicus and Freud.

Ernest Jones was one of the shapers of the twentieth century. He established psychoanalysis in Britain and wrote gripping popular works such as HAMLET AND THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX and ON THE NIGHTMARE, which made Freudian theory available to the likes of Sir Lawrence Olivier and Sylvia Plath. He presided over the translation of Freud’s work into English and, in 1938, daringly flew to Vienna to rescue Freud from the Nazi threat. In the 1950s he capped his life’s achievement by writing the three-volume biography of Freud that became an international bestseller and defined psychoanalysis for future generations.
The diminutive son of a South Wales colliery accountant, persuasive and determined, Jones improbably insinuated himself into the top ranks of Austro-Hungarian psychoanalysis. He knew well that women found him irresistible. Sexual charges ruined his early career as a doctor but, after exile in Canada, he recovered his reputation and – despite Freud’s misgivings about his ‘dark inconsistencies’ – wooed and won two wives. The tragic death of his first wife is part of the enigma of Ernest Jones.

Award-winning biographer Brenda Maddox uncovers the gripping drama of the life of this intrepid man. She investigates his early troubles with the law, his conversion to psychoanalysis, his long friendship with Freud – expressed in 671 letters – and even his peculiar passion for figure skating. FREUD'S WIZARD is a riveting resurrection of a crucial, but heretofore overlooked, architect of our modern intellectual landscape.

In 1953 one the greatest discoveries of the century was made - DNA. Nine years later three men, Crick, Watson and Wilkins, won the Nobel Prize for this revolutionary breakthrough. Yet while their names have since passed into scientific history, the woman who worked alongside them - Rosalind Franklin - is largely unknown. In this groundbreaking biography Brenda Maddox explores why the ‘dark lady’ of DNA has been left to languish in the background for so long and how her gender may have hindered her role in this extraordinary discovery.