Evie Swire was nine years old when she first heard the story of a woman who had lived near her home in Dorset and, in her own way, changed the world.

Mary Anning was born into a humble family in Lyme Regis in 1799 and grew up hunting for fossils in the area’s cliffs to supplement their meagre income. When she was 12, she and her brother discovered one of the first ichthyosaurus skeletons, and she would go on to make many other pioneering finds and become immensely knowledgeable in the emerging field of palaeontology.

She may have influenced Darwin, was certainly admired by Dickens, and is now considered one of the most important women in the history of science.

Evie thought Anning was cool. “Because usually when you hear about amazing people, they are from other places like London and stuff.” She asked her mother to take her to a statue of Anning in Lyme Regis.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anya Pearson and her daughter Evie Swire at Ringstead Bay, Dorset. Photograph: SWNS

“And my mum said: ‘Oh, she doesn’t have one,” Evie, now 12, told the Guardian. “And I said: ‘Why, because she is a really important woman?’ My mum said it was because she was a woman, and it was the Victorian times. And I thought it wasn’t right. Even after all the years since, it wasn’t OK for women to be amazing.”

So began an energetic campaign to right that wrong, initiated by Evie’s mother, Anya Pearson, and using the slogan “Mary Anning Rocks”.

In a little more than a year it has attracted the support of thousands of people online, raised thousands of pounds and recruited an impressive roster of patrons including Sir David Attenborough, Prof Alice Roberts and the novelist Tracy Chevalier .

This week they are hoping for another boost to the campaign. In a happy coincidence, Ammonite, a film about Anning starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, was filmed in Lyme Regis this year, after which the filmmakers made a donation of £15,000 to the town. On Tuesday Lyme Regis town council is due to decide how that money should be spent, and many local people have argued in favour of the statue.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kate Winslet on the set of Ammonite in Lyme Regis earlier this year. Photograph: Graham Hunt/Alamy

Pearson said she started the campaign because “to be honest I felt ashamed about it. I saw my daughter get really angry that this incredible woman had not got recognition in her home town. I just couldn’t get my head around it.

“It’s very easy to sit back and just accept these things, but sometimes it just needs somebody to take up the mantle.”

Her motto was “Go big or go to bed” – and go big she did. The Natural History Museum has thrown its weight behind the campaign, with its head of Earth sciences, Prof Richard Herrington, declaring that a statue in Lyme Regis “would be a fitting tribute to a woman who changed the face of geology”.

Despite so far having raised only a fraction of what they will need, Pearson is already talking to a number of leading sculptors, insisting there is one point on which the team will not compromise. “We want a female sculptor. End of.”

Mary Anning Rocks is not the only good cause hoping for a slice of the filmmakers’ cash: seven other groups have put in bids, including a local cancer charity that wants to erect a respite beach hut, and a scholarship fund in Anning’s name to help disadvantaged local young people study Earth sciences.

Even if the statue campaign’s bid is successful on Tuesday, it will still have some way to go in funding a project expected to cost a high five-figure sum at least. The campaigners plan to start crowdfunding in earnest in the new year and hope the film’s expected release in 2020 will turbo-charge their efforts.

A spokeswoman for See-Saw Films, the company behind Ammonite, said it had made the donation “because it was very important to us to shoot in Lyme Regis where Mary Anning lived and we had such great support from the residents of Lyme”.

How would Evie feel if she succeeds in getting a statue of her heroine installed? “I am going to be really happy,” she said, “because finally Mary [will have] the statue that she deserves.”