A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age by James Essinger Read Free Book Online

clearly hadn’t forgiven Annabella for the failed dowry and marriage and the forced sale of his beloved home Newstead Abbey. Electra plotted revenge (with her brother) against their mother, Clytemnestra, for the murder of their father, King Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks in the Trojan War.
    Whether Byron would have been King Agammnon to Ada’s Electra is another matter, at least if his illegitimate daughter Allegra was anything to go by. Allegra was born a little over a year after Ada on Sunday January 12 1817. She was the result of a brief affair between Byron and Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Mary Shelley, wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
    Allegra was born in the town of Bath, in England as ‘Alba’, and when she was a baby lived with her mother and the Shelleys. However, when Allegra was fifteen months old, Claire gave her to Byron. Claire was under serious financial pressure and the Shelleys did not want Allegra to live with them. Nor did Byron’s half-sister Augusta. So Claire journeyed to Italy to give the baby girl to the baby’s father, who had asked Claire to baptise the child ‘Allegra Byron’. Byron himself even discussed changing the spelling of Allegra’s surname to ‘Biron’.
    Allegra didn’t live with Byron either, but with a succession of people Byron paid to look after her. But she did visit him on occasion. He wrote approvingly to a friend, ‘My bastard came three days ago… healthy, noisy and capricious.’
    Byron liked the physical resemblance between Allegra and himself, but he hardly spent any time with her, and she only ever learned Venetian Italian, not English, because she was brought up by paid Venetian carers. In March 1820, he complained that Allegra was ‘obstinate as a mule’ and at the age of four, Allegra frequently had temper tantrums in front of Byron. She was packed off to be in the care of the nuns at the Capuchin convent in Bagnacavallo. They looked after her well, but in 1822, at the age of five, the little girl died, either of typhus or malaria.
    Despite seeing Annabella as Clytemnestra, Byron continued to write to her about Ada. In 1820 he sent a locket with his hair for his five-year-old daughter to carry around with her (it seems unlikely that Annabella was in a hurry to pass this on to Ada), and received a portrait of Ada in return.
    Ada Byron, after a miniature.
    Just before his death he asked for ‘some account of Ada’s disposition, habits, studies, moral tendencies, and temper, as well as her personal appearance.’ Annabella wrote back:
    Her prevailing characteristic is cheerfulness and good temper. Observation. Not devoid of imagination, but is chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical ingenuity – the manufacture of ships, boats, etc… Tall and robust.
    And so Ada, like Allegra, grew up remote from Byron both geographically and emotionally – unaware of her father’s warm interest in her. She was frequently ill as a child; her health was never particularly good and suffered from headaches and all manners of other childhood ailments. When Ada was seven and a half, she became particularly sick. She suffered from an illness that gave her especially sharp headaches, and even affected her eyesight in such a way that her doctor ordered her education to be halted. Lord Byron heard about her illness in 1823, not long after arriving in Greece to help the Greeks fight to win their freedom from the Ottoman Empire.
    He was so upset about hearing of Ada’s illness that he stopped writing in his journal, and his peace of mind about Ada was only to some extent restored when Lady Byron wrote to him in early 1824, saying that Ada felt better.
    This correspondence between Byron and his wife was usually carried out via Augusta, with whom Byron was in regular contact, but sometimes Lady Byron wrote to her estranged husband directly.
    Byron’s life on the Continent had been his usual round of affairs with both sexes, along with travel and writing