Today I was listening to Jane Goodall being interviewed and she said something I knew about but had forgotten. The whole reason she went off to Africa to study chimps in the wild was because she was madly in love with Tarzan. Huge fangirl!
“He married the wrong Jane!” she laughed.
But she was so caught up in the romance of it all that she literally went off to live with chimps at a time when field studies of wild animals simply did not exist, and women were not taken very seriously as scientists. And basically invented a whole approach to studying wild animals that is standard today, changed everything we know about chimps, and became one of nature’s biggest champions.
Because she loved real animals and one fictional man.
RIP to one of my heroes.
Jane Goodall 1934-2025