The Bride of Science : Romance, Reason and Byron's Daughter - Hardcover

Woolley, Benjamin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333724364 ISBN 13: 9780333724361

Publisher: Macmillan, 1999

Synopsis

Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, was born in 1815, and died aged 36. She was connected with some of the most influential and colourful characters of the age: Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin and Charles Babbage. It was her work with Babbage that led to her being credited with the invention of computer programming and to her name being adopted for the programming language that controls the US military machine. However, what makes her story is not her role as a dispassionate witness or great inventor. It is the way she personified the seismic historical changes taking place. This was the era when fissures began to open up in culture: romance split away from reason, instinct from intellect, art from science. Ada came to embody these new polarities. She struggled to reconcile them and they tore her apart.

About this title

Review

Ada Lovelace, the result of Lord Byron's short- lived marriage to Annabella Milbanke, is an extraordinary figure in 19th-century society. Not only was she the daughter of a celebrity, but she was the first computer programmer the world has known.

From the moment she was born, in 1815, Ada was a controversial figure. Her mother, a woman known for her piety and intellect, had fled the marital home taking her three-week-old baby with her. In this first comprehensive biography of Lovelace, Benjamin Woolley contends that the child embodied a chasm between Romanticism as represented by her father, and Reason as represented by his wife. He examines how, as an adult, she struggled to reconcile these opposites by creating a "poetical science". But first he deals with her childhood. We learn of Annabella's ferocious educational regime, and a young girl who, understandably, took refuge in the imagination.

Woolley's achievement is in making accessible the scientific theories that absorbed Lovelace and that led to her breakthrough in computer science. His approach to her work is grounded in her domestic setting which he portrays as oppressive, and as hastening her early death in 1852 from cervical cancer. The Bride of Science is a powerful piece of work, entirely appropriate for a revolutionary woman. --Lilian Pizzichini

Review

Woolley has a great story to tell and does it with racy vigour (Maggie Gee Daily Telegraph)

A splendid and enthralling portrait (Miranda Seymour Sunday Times)

An amazing story (Independent)

An entertaining and thoughtful biography (Guardian)

Edition details

• Publisher: Macmillan
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0333724364
• ISBN 13: 9780333724361
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432