Known in her teens as ‘The Rose of Jedburgh’, Mary Somerville’s still-glowing cheeks and a fondness for brightly coloured clothes (she sometimes wore an orange kimono) caused the less discerning to underrate her extraordinary mind. Ada never doubted that she had been introduced to a genius, while others sometimes found it difficult to equate Mrs Somerville’s formidable intelligence with her cheerful social manner. Encountering Mrs Somerville only at the dances which her daughters were attending, the Irish novelist Lady Morgan decided she resembled ‘one of the respectable twaddling chaperones one meets with at every ball, dressed in a snug mulberry velvet gown and a little cap with a red flower’. Maria Edgeworth was predictably more discerning. Writing to her mother on 17 January 1832, at the height of Mrs Somerville’s fame, Maria expressed admiration for her absolute lack of pretension: ‘while her head is among the stars her feet are firm upon the ground’.
The journey to international celebrity had not been easy. Brought up in the Scottish Borders by parents who disapproved of educated women, Miss Somerville taught herself mathematics by reading Euclid under the bedclothes. Other than her brief attendance of a school, her grasp of the subject was facilitated by a sympathetic brother who gave her access both to his textbooks and his tutors. The long absences at sea of her first husband (Samuel Greig was a naval officer) enabled Mary to continue with her studies while bringing up two children.
Widowed at twenty-seven, Mary remarried in 1812, when she was thirty-two. She found in her cousin William Somerville a devoted husband who revered his wife’s exceptional mind.* Tall, kindly and self-effacing, Dr Somerville shared in Mary’s pride when, twenty years later, the great educationalist Lord Brougham finally provided Jedburgh’s ‘Rose’ with the chance to flower into full bloom.
That opportunity was an invitation to translate into English the recently deceased Marquis de Laplace’s five-volume Mécanique céleste, a detailed and complex analysis of the movements of the planets in the light of Newton’s gravitational theory. It’s possible that Brougham had been prompted by Laplace himself. Mary and her husband were fond of telling the story of how France’s homegrown Newton, praising the only three women clever enough to understand his writings, had identified just two: Caroline Herschel, Mrs Somerville – and, a little comically, a certain ‘Mrs Greig, of whom I know nothing’. Published by John Murray in 1831, Somerville’s translation achieved the challenging task of simplifying Laplace’s often almost impenetrable text, while adding to it in a way that arguably surpassed the original.
The Laplace translation won Mrs Somerville the admiration of the scientific world. In 1834, the year that Ada became her protégée, the 54-year-old mathematician was about to publish a work of her own. On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences confirmed Mary Somerville as one of the most brilliant minds of her time: a mathematician who could effortlessly explain the newest ideas about astronomy, electricity, time, motion, light and even music. Nobody, with the possible exception of Somerville’s close friend Michael Faraday, had such a gift for putting difficult ideas into simple language. It was a technique that Ada would absorb and put to powerful use.
It was not Somerville’s unabashed femininity, but the plain fact that she was not a man that caused her still to be undervalued in England. Back in 1829, she had been hailed by an admiring fellow Scot, Sir David Brewster, as ‘the most extraordinary woman in Europe, a mathematician of the very first rank’. In 1835, the year after Ada began paying regular visits to her home, Mrs Somerville joined Caroline Herschel as one of the first two women to become honorary fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society. (Women – with the exception of Queen Victoria – were not permitted full fellowship until 1945.) It was Mrs Somerville’s marble bust that greeted the gentlemen members of the Royal Society as they walked into the entrance hall of that illustrious building. The lady herself was forbidden entry.
Mrs Somerville, when Mary Montgomery first brought Ada Byron to her home in February 1834, had been feeling wistful. Her Chelsea riverside home was damp and chilly enough to make her yearn to be settled back in the heart of London. (William Somerville had taken on a dull job at the Chelsea Hospital only after a cousin cheated the couple out of their hard-won savings.) For Mary, Ada was not only a beguilingly eager pupil, but a breath of fresh air. Woronzow Greig, the son of Mrs Somerville’s first marriage, remembered Miss Byron as pale, plump and shy. Alone with Mrs Somerville, however, Ada became confident and demonstrative. ‘Ada was much attached to me,’ Mrs Somerville would later recall, adding with evident pride that ‘it was by my advice that she studied mathematics’.
The claim was not precisely true. It was an anxious mother who had first steered Ada towards what was intended to be only a calming discipline; Mary Montgomery had taken the next step of finding her a superlative teacher. What nobody anticipated was that Ada would take to mathematics with such relish, displaying an eager determination to master and understand whatever she was shown. ‘She always wrote to me for an explanation,’ Mrs Somerville remembered; like Dr King, the kindly Scotswoman urged her impetuous pupil to proceed with care. By 24 March, Ada was boasting to Dr King that she had learned ‘to imagine to myself a figure in the air, and go through the construction & demonstration without any book or assistance whatsoever’. It was a typically exuberant claim from a young woman who was still working her way through
