In 1815, the clever, courted & cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious & brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile & died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet. Ada didn`t. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most progressive reformers of Victorian Engl&, Byron`s little girl was introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits. Educated by some of the most learned minds in Engl&, she combined that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart & a visionary imagination. As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a steam-driven flying horse. As an exuberant & 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 today of our modern computer age. When Ada died
- like her father, she was only 36
- great things seemed still to lie ahead for her as a passionate astronomer. Even while mired in debt from gambling & crippled by cancer, she was frenetically employing Faraday`s experiments with light refraction to explore the analysis of distant stars. Drawing on fascinating new material, Seymour reveals the ways in which Byron, long after his death, continued to shape the lives & reputations both of his wife & his daughter. During her life, Lady Byron was praised as a paragon of virtue; within ten years of her death, she was vilified as a disgrace to her sex. Well over a hundred years later, Annabella Milbanke is still perceived as a prudish wife & cruelly controlling mother. But her hidden devotion to Byron & her tender ambitions for his mercurial, brilliant daughter reveal a deeply complex but unsuspectedly sympathetic personality. Miranda Seymour has written a masterful portrait of two remarkable women, revealing how two turbulent lives were often governed & always haunted by the dangerously enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that extraordinary father whom Ada never knew.