against Mary Somerville because of her sex? The declared aim of the autobiography is to show how it is possible for awoman to overcome obstacles and achieve a high place in a male world. The narrative tries to encourage those who might often feel discouraged, for, although female education was easier to obtain when Mary Somerville wrote her Recollections than it was when she began her courses of private study, it remained difficult and many prejudices persisted which showed themselves still in her obituaries and even in the reviews of her Recollections. It was her achievement to be exemplary as a woman and as a scientist, to reach her goals without sacrificing relatively conventional femininity. Indeed, one of the prejudices that she never attacks, in fact probably shares, is the deeply embedded fear that commitment to the life of the mind might produce aggression or frumpishness in a woman.
Most of Mary Somerville’s explicit resentments in the Recollections are reserved for the problems of the early stages of her life. She explains how more or less anything was thought good enough for female education. Her father does not want her to become a ‘savage’ but a little learning is obviously deemed enough to prevent this. She is particularly good on the way in which the production of female deportment at Miss Primrose’s school is a form of torture and of intellectual imprisonment too:
Then a steel rod, with a semi-circle which went under the chin, was clasped to the steel busk in my stays. In this constrained state I, and most of the younger girls, had to prepare our lessons. (p. 18)
When she is released, becoming like a ‘wild animal escaped out of a cage’ (p. 20), she moves closer to a holistic response to the natural world, which is the kind of response that ultimately underpins her scientific thinking. All forms of life-writing are potentially suspect, insofar as they attempt to identify the future in the past but Mary Somerville’s depiction of her response to her natural environment at Burntisland carries the stamp of authenticity:
There was a small pier on the sands for shipping limestone brought from the coal mines inland. I was astonished to see the surface of these blocks of stone covered with beautiful impressions of what seemed to be leaves; how they got there I could not imagine, but I picked up the broken bits, and even large pieces, and brought them to my repository. (p. 21)
The human environment was less kind and Mary Somerville’s struggle against prejudice and indifference to acquire a classical and scientific education is equally authentically presented.
While it was truly hard for Mary Somerville to become proficient in mathematics through private study, there is little doubt nevertheless that once she had done a certain amount herself there were plenty of male practitioners who were anxious to assist her in an unpatronising manner. Her early loneliness and despondency (p. 37 and p. 60) were consequences of the limitations of her family circle but once she had won independence as a widow and, even better, married a second, supportive husband, the scientific world did not try to keep her out. And so, in the end, Mary Somerville got her scientific education in much the same way as any man from an unprivileged background at the time – through the generosity of a developing group of scientific men, amateur and professional, who were anxious not to fence off their patch but rather to invite in those who loved to learn.11 William Wallace, who supported Mary Somerville’s activities in mathematics during her first widowhood (p. 66), and Michael Faraday were both book-binders’ apprentices before their talents and the assistance of richer men placed them in significant positions in the scientific establishment. It is a proper tribute to this network, which shows itself throughout the Recollections, that Mary Somerville’s most ambitious book was On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, an attempt to do for science itself what all these lovers of truth were doing for each other – establishing a network of connections.
The scientific establishments of Britain and Europe were not, of course, free from competitiveness, aggression and snobbishness. Elizabeth Patterson’s account of the internal struggles between various factions of the Royal Society shows that the struggles at the Royal Society often had a gentlemen-versus-players aspect. But there is very little suggestion in or out of the Recollections of any aggression towards Mary Somerville, any feeling that she was an interloper.
Mary Somerville, then, may have been hindered at home, nagged by her prospective sister-in-law, denounced from the pulpit and spoken against in the House, but the scientific world in London, in Paris, in Geneva and, finally in the relative scientific backwater of Italy,12 opened its arms to her. To her these men were exceptionally civil, an effect perhaps of her own feminine civility.
It was no doubt Mary Somerville’s fortune, in the end, to be little and shy (pp. 48–9). If we look at the letters from scientists and mathematicians included in the volume, they are remarkable for a composite idiom, which I think we owe to a very large extent to the very nature of Mary Somerville. Of course, it is not that before her career scientists obsessively focused on their work in their letters and refused the pleasantries of social intercourse, but, nevertheless, a special tone of civility enters professional letters from Mary Somerville’s correspondents. Also illuminating in terms of epistolary discourse and gender are letters written by scientists to Mary Somerville’s husband. Sir John Herschel’s letter of 17 July 1830 to William Somerville (p. 174) is principally about the recognition of his wife, yet at the same time it is clearly an exchange between ‘chaps’, as it were. It is obvious that William Somerville found himself in no way emasculated by the abilities of his wife and no more did his acquaintance worry about his status, even after he retired because of ill-health.
But perhaps there is a problem with the civility of the letters to Mary Somerville from scientists, perhaps they are altogether too civil. There may well be a line, too fine to discern with security, between the civil and the patronising. Yet the amount of time spent on talking to and writing to Mary Somerville by these men can only be justified by something more than gallantry, and there is also, outside the Recollections, the evidence of the kind of letter that Martha Somerville did not include in her edition because it would be beyond the comprehension of ordinary readers. These letters, full of detailed equations and abstruse speculations, are exchanged with Herschel, Babbage and Lubbock, among many others. Again, with mostly trivial or petulant exceptions, contemporary reviews treat Mary Somerville’s work in a wholly unpatronising manner.13
Mary Somerville, then, both suffers from and profits from her femininity and it can be argued that this has been the constant problem for female achievers. It is a problem that Mary Somerville negotiated with more success than, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft, who continues to be castigated for being too womanly and not womanly enough, or, to choose the same field as Somerville, the unfortunate Ada Lovelace whose ‘womanly’ behaviour brought her close to disgrace and who died in great pain from her woman’s body (see ‘Brief Biographies’ pp. 349– 50). But Mary Somerville is herself insecure about this female body which she cannot quite reconcile with the notion of a sexless mind; she fears, in truth, that the mind, like the body, is gendered, and gendered by the body. The passage that reveals these fears most clearly was cut out of the published text and I have restored it:
In the climax of my great success, the approbation of some of the first scientific men of the age and of the public in general I was highly gratified, but much less elated than might have been expected, for although I had recorded in a clear point of view some of the most refined and difficult analytical processes and astronomical discoveries, I was conscious that I had never made a discovery myself, that I had no originality. I have perseverance and intelligence but no genius, that spark from heaven is not granted to the sex, we are of the earth, earthy, whether higher powers may be alotted to us in another state of existence God knows, original genius, in science at least, is hopeless in this. (p. 145)
Martha and Mary Somerville and Frances Power Cobbe must have felt at the time that this was an unnecessary hostage to fortune. In the obituaries in 1872 there were already signs of a willingness to downgrade her achievement. The Saturday Review, which also credits the erroneous story that her first husband was supportive, insists that she was an interpreter and expounder, not a discoverer: