Both Ada and Anne rise above listless, corset-bound tropes, humanized by their obsessions, jealousies, and longings.Ĭhiaverini also dodges other tropes common to historical novels. This, I must believe, was Chiaverini’s design, as it stirred me to examine the way we never truly see our parents - especially through the self-centered haze of youth - as fully formed beings, subject to all the hope and heartbreak life entails. Though the book shifts in chapter one to young Ada’s perspective, I continued to empathize with her mother even as my affinity for Ada grew. The prologue supplies the backstory of Lord and Lady Byron’s short, caustic marriage before Lady Byron leaves the famous poet with 6-week-old Ada in tow, never to see her father again. The novel’s greatest strength, however, lies in the expertly crafted characters of Ada and her mother. The scientific and mathematical principles over which Ada labors are likewise presented in a way entirely lucid and palatable, even to someone like me, who suffered through calculus with more frustration than comprehension. Ada’s world of 19th-century England is vivid, and never tedious or obtuse in its description. Though Chiaverini’s research was clearly voluminous, she weaves historical details into the prose with a light, skillful hand. Though less widely held, shades of this idea are still batted around today by university presidents and Silicon Valley engineers, making Ada’s struggle timely and relatable nearly 200 years later.Īgainst this turbulent backdrop, Chiaverini composes the tableaux of Ada’s life, and I found it a joy to witness on the page. More constraining still was the ubiquitous belief that advanced mathematics required a “very great tension of the mind…beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power.”

She achieved this feat despite her well-meaning but overbearing mother, Anne Milbanke, and the shadow of fame and infamy cast by her father, Lord Byron, foremost of England’s Romantic poets. These inventions and discoveries, combined with her own prodigious intellect, provided the fodder for her own “Great Work,” a mathematical algorithm for the Analytical Engine, one of the world’s earliest conceptualized computers.

But Ada’s travails and accomplishments as told in Enchantress of Numbers are both fascinating and enduringly relevant.Īda was born in England in 1815 at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, and witnessed in her short lifetime (only 36 years) numerous scientific and technological advancements.

I confess, I had not heard of Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, who is viewed by many scholars as the first computer programmer, before picking up Jennifer Chiaverini’s latest book.

Enchantress of numbers