I usually don’t write
reviews of fiction books, but occasionally I find a
novel so enjoyable, or its subject so interesting or important that I want to
write about it. That is the case with Enchantress
of Numbers, a novel by Jennifer Chiaverini.
The subject is Ada Lovelace, who I think is interesting and
important. She is credited as the author of the first published computer program in 1843. The only thing resembling a computer at the time was in
the drawings and notes of mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, a friend of Lovelace. He called the
device, which was never built, an analytical engine.
Lovelace’s contribution
has been debated, but it seems likely that she saw more capability in the
analytical engine than even its inventor. As she described in her notes on her
translation of a scientific paper on Babbage’s invention, originally printed in
French and shorter than her notes were, she
imagined the device being able to handle all manner of symbolic and logical
functions in addition to solving mathematical equations. Even Babbage himself
seemed mainly to see it as an improvement on his difference engine, a
programmable calculating machine that was partly built, but never finished.
If she had been a man,
her accomplishment would very likely have received much more accolades than it
did at the time, or even for more than a century afterward. It was unusual for
a woman to be even permitted to study math or science in those days. Her mother encouraged
her to take on these fields to discourage her from following in the footsteps
of her father, the poet Lord Byron.
Lovelace lived in a
period of great change in society and science. She was a contemporary of Charles Darwin. She was a friend of Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday. When Queen Victoria was coronated, her husband was
elevated to an earl and the new monarch called her forward to take her hand as
the couple, newly made Count and Countess Lovelace, were took their bows. She
attended the Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the Crystal Palace, where the exhibits included the
still relatively new telegraph.
I wasn’t sure I would
care for a novelization of Lovelace’s life. I was not especially impressed with
Arthur
and George, Julian Barnes’ novel based on events from the life
of Arthur Conan Doyle; I thought I would have preferred a
straight nonfiction book on the subject. I found
Chiaverini’s novel more compelling, perhaps because it is written as if by Ada
Lovelace herself. As with any such fictionalization, there are parts that
Chiaverini made up, though she draws on sources I enjoyed such as Benjamin Woolley’s excellent biography Bride
of Science and James Essinger’s defense of the countess, Ada’s
Algorithm. I
realize that there are people who will pick up a novel who would not be
attracted to a biography, and if it takes that to get more
people to now about Ada Lovelace an her contributions, then Chiaverini’s effort
was worthy.
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