I cannot consider that the parent has any right to direct the child or to expect obedience in such things as concern the child only. I will give a practical illustration of my meaning. [The example given was of a window to be closed in Annabella’s own room by her own instructions – fair enough – or of a window in Ada’s chamber: unacceptable.] . . . The one case concerns you & your comfort, the other concerns me only and cannot affect or signify to you. Do you see the line of distinction that I draw? I have given the most familiar possible illustration, because I wish to be as clear as possible. Till 21, the law gives you a power of enforcing obedience on all points; but at that time I consider your power and your claim to cease . . .
Smart, fierce and articulate, Ada’s letter marked the beginning of a lifelong battle between two intransigent characters: an exceptionally strong-willed mother and her equally strong-willed daughter. The letter also demonstrates that Miss Byron, now seventeen, had developed an uncommon gift for expressing herself. This faculty, as much as her still nascent mathematical ability, would prove crucial to Ada’s remarkable future.
The stronger Ada grew (she could by now rejoice at her skill in ‘leaping’ a horse over a gate), the more complex her relationship with Annabella became. She had fired off her letter of teenage defiance while consenting – as a sop to her mother – to make her first presentation curtsey in that summer of 1833 at the Brighton-based court of William IV. Arrayed in white satin and tulle and still limping a little as the 7th Lord Byron’s wife gently shepherded her towards the throne, Ada betrayed the same critical eye that her mother had trained on London society when she herself first arrived there from the north of England. Healthy enough by now to stand for fifteen minutes – but no more – without fatigue, Miss Byron was introduced to the Duke of Orléans (‘very pleasing’), to Wellington (who passed muster) and to Talleyrand (whose face reminded her of an old monkey). Visiting Brighton again in the autumn of 1833, a proud Ada boasted to Fanny Smith about how warmly her mother had been received by the royal couple. Lady Byron had actually been invited to sit next to the queen and had conversed at length with the king, Ada informed her friend. Dressed (so Ada bragged) in a dashingly low-cut dress of crimson brown and wearing a pale straw hat decorated with white feathers, ‘my illustrious parent’ had looked ‘very pretty indeed’. Lady Byron herself was shyly surprised by the kindness of the welcome she had received. The king and queen had been really friendly to her, Annabella wrote with evident pleasure to Sophia Frend.
Ada’s pride in her mother’s warm reception did not mean that she herself had become suddenly submissive. Over a decade later, she would offer a heartfelt apology for the way she had behaved as a wilful teenager, deceiving Lady Byron about ‘all my real feelings’. (Ruefully, she added: ‘And a pretty mess I made of it.’) Back in 1833, a less conscience-stricken Ada evinced every sign of becoming alarmingly uncontrollable. At the end of the year, running short of ways to rein her daughter in, an exhausted Annabella turned to religion for salvation. Perhaps contemplation of the heavens would serve to calm the rattled nerves, not only of a volatile daughter, but of a mother unsettled by the recent evidence of new and shocking misbehaviour by the erring Mrs Leigh.* By March 1834, Ada noted that her mother and she were reading together and enjoying Dr Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise. A religious interpretation of Laplace’s theorising of a godless universe, Whewell’s contribution to the series of treatises commissioned on his deathbed by the Earl of Bridgewater appealed greatly to Ada’s growing interest in astronomy.
It was around this time that Annabella settled upon the earnest and flawlessly respectable Dr William King as that ideal tutor who might combine sober instruction in calming mathematics for her daughter with an uplifting course of religious education. Ada’s response was suspiciously meek. Mrs King, who had previously been shocked to hear about Miss Byron’s Ealing romance, was demurely informed by her husband’s new pupil that religion was having an excellent effect. Ada took such comfort from the ‘pleasant walks’ and interesting discussions she had been experiencing with kind Dr King. She was absorbing his wise advice about controlling her imagination. She was so truly grateful for his thoughtful care.
Evidence that Ada was receiving instruction from somebody with a far livelier mind than Dr King began to appear that spring. On 15 March 1834, while reading Whewell and being urged by Dr King to lift up her thoughts unto God, Ada wrote to consult her mother’s old tutor, William Frend, about rainbows.
Dogmatic though Frend could be upon certain topics – he had controversial views on algebra and rejected the idea of negative numbers – he had never underrated Ada’s capacity to look at life from original angles. Her new preoccupation concerned prismatic light. ‘I cannot make out one thing at all,’ Ada wrote to his London home in Gower Street, ‘viz: why a rainbow always appears to the spectator to be an arc of a circle. Why is it a curve at all, and why a circle rather than any other curve?’ Sadly, Frend’s response to an intriguing but not unanswerable question is not preserved.*
It was precisely this enterprising, inquisitive aspect of Ada’s mind that Dr King had been urged to harness. A careful examination of the lengthy and seemingly dutiful letter Ada wrote to him on 9 March that year should have warned the earnest cleric that he was on a hiding to nothing. Ada was perfectly aware that mathematics had been
