“Oh! What an instrument of torture I have acquired in you,” Byron famously exclaimed on first beholding his baby daughter Ada, leaving it unclear whether he saw himself as the scourger or the scourged. In truth, it was probably a bit of both. Within six months the poet had left Britain and would never see either his daughter or his wife Annabella again. He spent the next decade racketing around the continent writing verse that was beautiful and scabrous by turns, and intervening in foreign conflicts that were actually none of his business. Annabella Byron, meanwhile, morphed from wretched bride into a queenly philanthropist, who was equally certain that she knew what was best for other people. Baby Ada, by contrast, grew up to be mostly interested in herself. She was, she announced proudly, a genius.
The story of this unhappy trio has been told before, but seldom with as much brio as it is here. Miranda Seymour’s particular aim is to rescue Annabella from over a century’s worth of bad press. Everyone, detractors and advocates alike, agrees that at the age of 22 she was too naive to see how stupid it was to pester Byron into marrying her when he was clearly only after her fortune. She’d always had a thing about Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy and thought Byron was cut from the same cloth. But Darcy didn’t go in for incest, nor did he (as far as we know) express a preference for sodomy or greet the news of his engagement by muttering “it never rains but it pours”. In short, Byron was not the delicious hero of a romantic novel but a broken soul whose death at the age of 36 was a mercy to everyone concerned.
Once Annabella was legally separated from him the moral scales started to quiver: she began to let everyone know how impeccably she had behaved throughout the whole ghastly business. She leaked information that revealed Byron as a beast who got up to all sorts of unnatural practices, including sleeping with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Perversely, Annabella then went out of her way, at least initially, to be gracious to the hopeless Augusta and bailed out the even more awful Medora, the daughter born from the incestuous affair.
Seymour is alive to all the self-serving bluster here, but she is equally keen that we should hear about Annabella’s generosity towards people who neither knew nor cared about her year of living dangerously with a naughty poet. Inspired by the educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi, she built schools for the poor that sensibly banished religion, prizes or corporal punishment and featured lots of fresh air instead.
Yet within months of her death in 1860, Annabella’s good deeds were getting buried under a slurry of gossip, and she was retrospectively accused of having concocted dirty stories about Byron as a way of besmirching the great man’s name. Only now, in Seymour’s careful hands, is she finally allowed to emerge as a figure who was neither saint nor sinner but somewhere in between.
If Annabella’s story is a warning about how quickly posthumous reputations can warp into ugly new shapes, her daughter’s case demonstrates the exact opposite. At the time of her death in 1852, also at 36, the name “Ada Lovelace” meant nothing to the general public. Yet to a small group of established scientific figures including Mary Somerville, Charles Babbage and Augustus de Morgan she was simply extraordinary. At the age of 11 she designed a flying machine based on the structure of a crow’s wing. When still in her 20s she translated Luigi Menabrea’s seminal article on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, supplemented by her own dense appendices, one of which has been described by people who know as the world’s “first computer program”.
Among those knowledgeable people are three academic mathematicians who have collaborated to produce a short account of Lovelace’s intellectual development, organised around reproductions of key documents from her archive in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Particularly fascinating is her correspondence with De Morgan, in which strings of numbers, signs and equilateral triangles dance excitedly across the page. It’s so easy, given our current desire to turn Lovelace into a poster girl for women in science, to lose sight of the exact flavour of her talent. Christopher Hollins et al conclude that, while she was a promising mathematician, her particular genius lay in her ability to make imaginative leaps between parts of the mathematical universe that were, according to her pleased observation, “seldom or never brought into juxtaposition”.
How ironic, then, that it was this tendency to skitter sideways that accounts for the great calamity of Ada’s life. Seymour explains that her mathematical confidence meant that she was convinced she had found a surefire way of betting on racehorses. She hadn’t, and ended up having to pawn the family jewels twice – a scrape that you tend not to read about in the current crop of “Clever Girls in History” primers aimed at fostering the female scientific stars of the future.
• In Byron’s Wake is published by Simon & Schuster. To order a copy for £17.25 (RRP £25) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.
• Ada Lovelace is published by Bodleian Library. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
