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

inheritance from her mother, she was now a very wealthy woman. Her days of poverty with Byron were over. He had taken his debts with him in his grave. She now owned estates in Leicestershire that provided a substantial income.
    Lady Byron now also owned coal mines in the north of England, and lived in luxury with Ada on the proceeds of the coal mined from them and from her rents. Meanwhile, of course, the coal-miners lived from hand to mouth in damp, cold cottages. Lady Byron, though, often sponsored schemes to help educate her miners’ and tenants’ children.
    For Lady Byron, it was a great adventure to educate Ada. The little girl was famous throughout the nation because of her father, and Lady Byron was aware that her education of Ada would itself soon come under the spotlight.
    As Ada passed from girlhood to womanhood, Lady Byron’s educational energy, far from flagging, increased.
    The usual educational opportunities open to girls in the early nineteenth century varied from limited to non-existent. Even middle-class and aristocratic girls were usually only taught such skills as were necessary for overseeing the management of the households they could one day expect to oversee.
    Many professional educators, even female ones, actually believed women’s minds to be inferior to men’s at a fundamental biological level. The fallacious reason often given at the time was that women’s brains are on average smaller in physical mass than those of men.
    Lady Byron’s zeal as an educator stemmed from the unusually broad education she had herself received as the only daughter of wealthy, liberal, forward-thinking parents. She had studied history, poetry, literature, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, drawing and dancing. Lady Byron was was now rich enough, and confident enough, to get what she wanted.
    That, of course, did not mean that Ada would find an outlet for her mental energies after her education was completed anymore than Lady Byron had done herself.
    Even for a girl of Ada’s socially elevated class who yearned to lead a mentally fulfilling life, opportunities were close to non-existent. There was generally little alternative but to marry, produce children and live for one’s husband. The idea of Ada doing anything other than marry would not have entered her mother’s mind. Ada’s education was there to stock her mind. Beating a path for science, however, was anathema. Lady Byron, to whom Ada was in thrall for much of her life, was conscious of how disastrous her own marriage had been. She was determined that Ada would marry an aristocrat who could offer Ada a secure, comfortable domestic life. Ideally, Lady Byron wanted Ada to marry into the older aristocracy as there was a particular appeal at the time for titles that were more than a century old – indeed, such as the Byron baronetcy.
    Lady Byron, now rich, influential and strong-willed, was quickly getting – if she wasn’t already – used to having her wishes obeyed. Ada’s yearning to lead a life of the mind, readily expressed even in the letters she wrote as a teenage girl, was thus doomed from the start. She was destined to spend much of her life aching to use her mind, but was confronted with the day-to-day reality of children, nannies, servants, running a household and dealing with a husband’s whims.
    Some middle-class women, such as Jane Austen, the Brontës or – later in the century – George Eliot won careers for themselves through successful authorship. When they did, the reality of their struggle was likely to be a key subject of their books; Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), for example, is largely autobiographical in its account of the predicament of an intellectually gifted young woman forced to confront the rigid limitations of life as a governess.
    It was also true that, occasionally, enormous talent along with a stroke of good fortune, might give a woman an opportunity to escape the bonds of domesticity. Another middle-class