‘poor Mrs Leigh and all connected with her are mad’: Michael and Melissa Bakewell, Augusta Leigh: Byron’s Half-Sister (Chatto, 2000), p. 336.
Selina Doyle and she were struggling to read German together, she told Robert Noel: AAB to Robert Noel, 27 August 1830, Betty Toole, The Enchantress of Numbers (Strawberry Press, 1992), p. 42.
Laughing at her own ‘disputation habits’: AAB to Arabella Lawrence, n.d., summer 1830, Dep. Lovelace Byron 172, fols. 180–2.
‘it will be so nice . . . and I shall have no trouble in making up my mind about anything’: AAB to Arabella Lawrence, n.d., Sunday, August 1830, Dep. Lovelace Byron 172, fols. 184–5.
‘No creed. No scripture books’: AINB to Elizabeth Blackwell, 27 May 1851, in Julia Boyd, The Excellent Doctor Blackwell: The Life of the First Woman Physician (Sutton, 2006), pp. 126–7.
‘God knows I have enough of it, and a great plague it often is’: AAL to AINB, 21 April 1840, Dep. Lovelace Byron 41.
by August, in Brighton, Ada was able to boast to Selina Doyle’s illegitimate niece, Fanny Smith: AAB to Fanny Smith, 5 August 1832, Dep. Lovelace Byron 112, fols. 94–100.
‘as far as they could without actual penetration’: Woronzow Greig, Memoir, MSBY Dep. b. 206, folder MSIF 2–4.
Miss Byron’s public disgrace had just been avoided: Sophia De Morgan, Threescore Years and Ten: Reminiscences of the late Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan (London, 1895), p. 89.
a consequent debt of gratitude ‘of which I am so sure I shall never need to be reminded by you’: AAB to WK, 28 June 1835, Toole, op. cit., pp. 76–7.
‘I cannot consider that the parent has any right to direct the child’: AAB to AINB, 19 May 1833, Dep. Lovelace Byron 41, fols. 85–8.
‘my illustrious parent’ had looked ‘very pretty indeed’: AAB to Fanny Smith, 9 November 1833, Dep. Lovelace Byron 112, fols. 94–100.
Over a decade later, she would offer a heartfelt apology for the way she had behaved as a wilful teenager: AAL to AINB, n.d. November 1844, Dep. Lovelace Byron 42, fols. 152–8.
‘[For] nothing but very close & intense application’: AAB to Dr William King, 9 March 1834, Toole, op. cit., pp. 53–4
Chapter Twelve: Mathematical Friendships (1834–5)
the Irish novelist Lady Morgan decided she resembled ‘one of the respectable twaddling chaperones one meets’: H. V. Morton, A Traveller in Italy (Methuen, 1964), pp. 482–4. Morton’s delightful account of Mrs Somerville brings her to life with remarkable skill.
‘while her head is among the stars her feet are firm upon the ground’: Maria Edgeworth to an unnamed friend, 17 January 1832, quoted in Mrs Somerville’s posthumously published and heavily edited Personal Recollections (John Murray, 1873), p. 156. (Edgeworth was fascinated by the scientific world, although not herself a contributor to it.)
Mary and her husband were fond of telling the story: Mrs Somerville’s posthumously published Personal Recollections (1873) cite Laplace’s tribute to her from a personal encounter in Paris. Maria Edgeworth confirmed his high opinion in an 1822 letter to her mother. Laplace, she said, had observed that Mrs Somerville could not only understand, but correct him. (C. Colvin (ed.), Maria Edgeworth: Letters from England 1813–44 (OUP, 1971), pp. 371–2.)
‘the most extraordinary woman in Europe, a mathematician of the very first rank’: David Brewster to J. D. Forbes, 11 September 1829, Forbes Papers, University of St Andrews Library.
‘Ada was much attached to me,’ Mrs Somerville would later recall: Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections, op. cit., Ch. 10.
By 24 March, Ada was boasting to Dr King: AAB to Dr William King, 24 March 1834, Dep. Lovelace Byron 172, fols. 131–4.
‘You must trammel your mind . . .’ he warned: Dr King to AAB, 24 April 1834, Dep. Lovelace Byron 172, fols. 132–9.
‘The logarithmetical Frankenstein’: London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, Etc (1832) commenting on Babbage’s appearance at a meeting of the newly formed British Association for the Advancement of Science.
subsidising an invention which – unlike James Watt’s steam engine – had been developed without any prototype: The reference is made in Dionysius Lardner’s defence of Babbage in the Edinburgh Review (July 1834, pp. 266–7).
Sophia Frend later described how, ‘young as she was’, Ada had immediately grasped the concept: Sophia De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus de Morgan (1882; republished by Elibron Classics, 2005), p. 89.
‘We both went to see the thinking machine’: Lady Byron to Dr William King, 21 June 1833, Dep. Lovelace Byron 77, fol. 217.
‘I am afraid that when a machine, or a lecture, or anything of the kind, come[s] in my way’: AAB to Mary Somerville, 8 July 1834, MSBY, Dep. c. 367, folder MSBY-2.
‘Ada does not think anything the world offers worth trouble, except Music’: AINB to Elizabeth Siddons, n.d. 1834, HRC, bound vol. 1 of the Byron Collection.
‘The risk to man and beast – the desperate gambling among the spectators – the futility of the object’: AINB to Harriet Siddons, n.d., HRC, bound vol. 1 of the Byron Collection.
‘I feel my intellect reviving . . .’: AINB to Harriet Siddons, 8 August 1834, HRC, Bound vol. 1 of the Byron Collection.
‘My dear Annabella. You must pardon my scolding!’: AAB to Lady Annabella Acheson, 5 December 1834, Dep. Lovelace Byron 168, fols. 28–9. Ada’s early mathematical writings were freshly transcribed and put online in 2016 by Dr Christopher Hollings and Professor Adrian Rice (see Ch. 15, note to p. 224, ‘Festina lente’).
‘indeed I think I am making great progress’: AAB to Annabella Acheson, 26 November 1834, Dep. Lovelace Byron 168, fols. 25–7.
It was ‘in the highest department of mathematics – I understand it to include the means of solving equations that hitherto had been considered insoluble’: AINB, unpublished diary, 15 December 1834, Dep. Lovelace Byron 117, fol. 1.
During her autumn at Wimpole Street, she wrote a poem in which God the Father was boldly replaced by a maternal deity: AINB to Elizabeth Siddons, 3 October 1834, HRC, bound vol. 1 of the Byron Collection.
His new idea, so she firmly noted, was ‘unsound’: AINB, unpublished diary, 15 December 1834, 17 November
