Even while mired in debt from gambling and crippled by cancer, she was frenetically employing Faraday’s experiments with light refraction to explore the analysis of distant stars.ĭrawing on fascinating new material, Seymour reveals the ways in which Byron, long after his death, continued to shape the lives and reputations both of his wife and his daughter. When Ada died-like her father, she was only 36-great things seemed still to lie ahead for her as a passionate astronomer. As an exuberant and boldly unconventional young woman, she amplified her explanations of Charles Babbage’s unbuilt calculating engine to predict-as nobody would do for another century-the dawn of the modern computer age. As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a steam-driven flying horse. Educated by some of the most learned minds in England, she combined that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart and a visionary imagination. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron’s little girl was introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits. The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet.Īda didn’t. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. In 1815, the clever, courted, and cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. A masterful portrait of two remarkable women, revealing how two turbulent lives were always haunted by the dangerously enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that extraordinary father whom Ada never knew: Lord Byron.

In Byron's Wake by Miranda Seymour