Show and Tell
Writing about Victorian women is hard. You have to fight through all sorts of competing agendas to figure out what really happened in their lives.
I first noticed it when I wrote my Florence Nightingale biography a year and a half ago. The previous biographies I read had radically different takes on her life, and especially her relationships with her mother and her sister. One book wanted to make her mother the bad guy, responsible for Florence's misery before she was allowed to go into nursing. Another wanted to make her sister the bad guy, and another wanted both. A number of the books I looked at and discarded wanted to turn Florence into a paragon of caring - but properly submissive - Christian womanly virtue. Florence was actually a Unitarian, and if she'd been submissive, we'd never have heard of her. Then I found the wonderful online archive of Florence's papers, established and maintained at Canada's University of Guelph, and it revealed other things. Some of Florence's best-known quotes are taken out of context. One thing she supposedly said was actually said by someone else, and one thing that her statistics mentor William Farr supposedly told her is actually something she told him. (I even wrote to Guelph about that one, asking "Am I reading this correctly?" I was.)
Now I'm wrapping up the story of Ada Lovelace, and I'm finding the same thing. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. Ada was the daughter of the notorious poet Lord Byron. Think of her as the Victorian version of the Kardashian children, or Michael Jackson's daughter Paris. Her father was an unrepentant philanderer his entire life, seducing not just women but at least a few men as well - and his own half-sister, producing a daughter with her. Ada was taught mathematics as part of an effort to keep her "poetical" side in check - but it didn't always work.
Ada's life came crashing down at the end. She'd gotten the idea that her mathematical brilliance could translate to success in betting on horse races, and she organized a ring of investors to bet with her. Unfortunately, she was wrong, to the tune of a £3200 loss, at a time when her annual allowance was only £300. This was happening at the same time she was dying of either cervical or uterine cancer - that is to say, she had both, but there's no way for us to know today where it started and where it spread to. She stole the Lovelace family diamonds and gave them to a friend named John Crosse, to have them pawned - not once, but twice, the second time after she had already been caught the first time. And in her final months, she confessed her sins to her husband. He took what he heard to the grave, but it's widely believed she confessed to having an affair with John Crosse. Only by the time she met John Crosse, her cancer would already have progressed beyond the point where a physical relationship was possible. She likely would have been in too much pain for sex. So was it only an emotionally romantic affair? We'll never know. After Ada died, her mother and her mother's lawyers went on a campaign to clean up her reputation as much as possible, to save the rest of the family from scandal. However many incriminating letters and documents there might have been, the vast majority of them were destroyed.
So how much of this do I put in a mathematically-focused biography for middle school kids? It's not really relevant to the math - apart from the horse-racing part - but I don't want to make her squeaky clean, either. I want to present the real Ada, but without going overboard on the gory details. There's a fine line to tread here, and I'm still trying to figure out where it is.
There's a certain image held up for women of the Victorian Era, and you've got to contend with it if you're going to write about them. A leading member of the Florence Nightingale Society read my book and complained that I hadn't understood Florence's "Victorian womanhood," largely - as far as I can tell - because I referred to her "stubbornness" when dealing with the military bureaucracy at Scutari Hospital. I meant it as a compliment. Stubbornness was exactly what the situation called for, and she wouldn't have succeeded without it. But I guess Victorian women weren't supposed to be stubborn.
Fortunately, I have no more Victorian women to write about in my upcoming books. Maybe I'll have better luck with someone else.
I first noticed it when I wrote my Florence Nightingale biography a year and a half ago. The previous biographies I read had radically different takes on her life, and especially her relationships with her mother and her sister. One book wanted to make her mother the bad guy, responsible for Florence's misery before she was allowed to go into nursing. Another wanted to make her sister the bad guy, and another wanted both. A number of the books I looked at and discarded wanted to turn Florence into a paragon of caring - but properly submissive - Christian womanly virtue. Florence was actually a Unitarian, and if she'd been submissive, we'd never have heard of her. Then I found the wonderful online archive of Florence's papers, established and maintained at Canada's University of Guelph, and it revealed other things. Some of Florence's best-known quotes are taken out of context. One thing she supposedly said was actually said by someone else, and one thing that her statistics mentor William Farr supposedly told her is actually something she told him. (I even wrote to Guelph about that one, asking "Am I reading this correctly?" I was.)
Now I'm wrapping up the story of Ada Lovelace, and I'm finding the same thing. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. Ada was the daughter of the notorious poet Lord Byron. Think of her as the Victorian version of the Kardashian children, or Michael Jackson's daughter Paris. Her father was an unrepentant philanderer his entire life, seducing not just women but at least a few men as well - and his own half-sister, producing a daughter with her. Ada was taught mathematics as part of an effort to keep her "poetical" side in check - but it didn't always work.
Ada's life came crashing down at the end. She'd gotten the idea that her mathematical brilliance could translate to success in betting on horse races, and she organized a ring of investors to bet with her. Unfortunately, she was wrong, to the tune of a £3200 loss, at a time when her annual allowance was only £300. This was happening at the same time she was dying of either cervical or uterine cancer - that is to say, she had both, but there's no way for us to know today where it started and where it spread to. She stole the Lovelace family diamonds and gave them to a friend named John Crosse, to have them pawned - not once, but twice, the second time after she had already been caught the first time. And in her final months, she confessed her sins to her husband. He took what he heard to the grave, but it's widely believed she confessed to having an affair with John Crosse. Only by the time she met John Crosse, her cancer would already have progressed beyond the point where a physical relationship was possible. She likely would have been in too much pain for sex. So was it only an emotionally romantic affair? We'll never know. After Ada died, her mother and her mother's lawyers went on a campaign to clean up her reputation as much as possible, to save the rest of the family from scandal. However many incriminating letters and documents there might have been, the vast majority of them were destroyed.
So how much of this do I put in a mathematically-focused biography for middle school kids? It's not really relevant to the math - apart from the horse-racing part - but I don't want to make her squeaky clean, either. I want to present the real Ada, but without going overboard on the gory details. There's a fine line to tread here, and I'm still trying to figure out where it is.
There's a certain image held up for women of the Victorian Era, and you've got to contend with it if you're going to write about them. A leading member of the Florence Nightingale Society read my book and complained that I hadn't understood Florence's "Victorian womanhood," largely - as far as I can tell - because I referred to her "stubbornness" when dealing with the military bureaucracy at Scutari Hospital. I meant it as a compliment. Stubbornness was exactly what the situation called for, and she wouldn't have succeeded without it. But I guess Victorian women weren't supposed to be stubborn.
Fortunately, I have no more Victorian women to write about in my upcoming books. Maybe I'll have better luck with someone else.
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