Ada kept her word. Throughout the August of 1842 and on into the autumn, she retreated to the now partly habitable splendour of Ashley Combe. There, dwelling within her husband’s Gothicised riff on a medieval castle, its lancet windows looking across Porlock’s broad and silvery bay, Ada played her harp and resumed her mathematical studies. Writing to Augustus De Morgan at the end of August, she told him that she had been working hard, and with good results.
All that mattered was to find the right balance.
Writing to Woronzow Greig on 16 December 1842, in answer to one of his annual and always searching letters about her projects, Ada chided Mrs Somerville’s sober son for treating her ambitions as mere whims. Slyly, Greig had compared her to Madame de Staël’s Corinne, a woman possessed of exceptional imagination, sensibility and – like her creator – an immense ego. And how many worlds did their very own Corinne plan to conquer, he had enquired?
Greig’s reference touched a raw nerve. Tartly, Ada responded that she did not care for de Staël’s loquacious heroine and her Werther-like dramas of the heart. For herself, she aspired only to reconcile her desire to excel in music (she thought now both of singing and of composing) with what might still prove to be ‘my ultimate vocation: namely, Science and Mathematics’.
Brave words. And yet, Mr Greig and his wife must have shuddered when they read what followed:
Time must show. To say the truth, I have less ambition than I had. And what I really care most about is now perhaps to establish in my mind those principles & habits that will fit me best for the next state. There is in my nervous system such utter want of all ballast & steadiness, that I cannot regard my life or powers other than precarious . . . there are the seeds of destruction, within me. This I know.
Ada Lovelace’s egocentricity – the words ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘myself’ appeared twenty-seven times in a not especially lengthy letter – bore out Greig’s reference to Corinne. Here was the ego written on a de Staël-like scale. And with cause. Aged just twenty-eight, Ada was a young woman who lived under the constant threat of a total breakdown in her health. The projects she described were always overshadowed by the intimations of her own frailty. How could Byron’s brilliant, ambitious daughter not obsess about her own mortality as she remembered the cruel shortness of her father’s own life span. Ada was twenty-eight. Byron had died at thirty-six. Time was running out.
Ada had chosen to be a little reticent with Woronzow Greig. Writing an undated letter to Lord Lovelace from St James’s Square sometime during the final weeks of 1842, she began with generalities. She was taking the affianced Hester off to the theatre to hear Adelaide Kemble sing. Her interest was now confined entirely to matters that were either musical or scientific. And then, as if to tease her husband, for ‘I have nothing very particular to tell you’, Ada released the information that an admiring Crow and a devoted Hen had been patiently hoping to hear:
Wheatstone has been with me a long while today, & has taken my translation away with him, after reading it over with me. I hope to receive the proofs of it for corrections, by & bye as I trust [Richard] Taylor will not reject it. I am now translating a beautiful Italian scientific paper.
It is not known what the ‘beautiful’ Italian paper was, but the translation that Charles Wheatstone had carried off to submit for future publication – considerable revisions still lay ahead – was the first account to be published in English – from French – of Charles Babbage’s magnificent, and still unbuilt, Analytical Engine. And it was Ada – wild, unpredictable, brilliant Ada – who was the translator.
* The atmospheric railway scheme drove carriages uphill at 25 mph by means of a series of magnificently designed pumping stations and traction piping. Speeds of as much as 45 mph were achieved on the stretch of line in West Croydon visited by Ada. Lady Byron was unimpressed. Her eventual rail portfolio of £67,000 in 1860 (worth about £3 million today) did not include shares in the atmospheric railway.
* Medora’s revelation chimed with suspicious neatness with a letter that Miss Montgomery had written to Annabella in 1823 from Genoa, where she learned from the gossipy Lady Blessington that some vindictive correspondent was slandering the reputation of Byron’s wife (LP). Miss Montgomery, Medora and Lady Byron were all living under the same roof in Paris; the echo of the conversation preceding Medora’s wild claim is almost audible.
* Probably by measuring the speed at which a ball rolled down a sloping tray, which is still a popular experiment with budding mathematicians.
* Photographed in his late sixties, Lord Lovelace could still proudly squeeze into the tightly fitting cavalry officer’s uniform that he had worn upon his wedding day.
* Ada’s kindness is too often overlooked. In 1840, she turned down a personal invitation to the queen’s birthday party, preferring to accompany a nervous former children’s governess to the East
