have wished to linger on after her death.
Finally, it is Mary Somerville’s insistence on the need for connection that makes her an icon for her time and its concerns. The Connexion of the Physical Sciences explicitly pronounces connection as an aim but all her work drives towards connection rather than separatist categorisation, and this emphasis seems characteristic of Somerville as memoirist too. For her, the desirable life is also the connected life and it is a life that does not categorise lest it stigmatise life’s more homely areas. The small number of her contemporaries who tried to diminish Mary Somerville were usually those who did not understand that making marmalade and studying the calculus are not incompatible; that ‘spotting muslin’ is not, in spite of Veitch’s remarks (p. 81), too lowly an activity for an intellectual woman, provided that her aspirations are not inhibited by it. In all areas of her activity Mary Somerville’s appropriate motto was the one she herself assumed for Molecular and Microscopic Science: ‘Deus magnus in magnis, maximus in minimis’: ‘God great in great things, greatest in the least’.24
Dorothy McMillan
I cite pagination in the manner requested by Elizabeth Patterson, whose catalogue I have also gratefully used.
1 Somerville Collection/SC: Dep. c.356, box 2, MSAU-4.
2 SC: Dep. c.355, box 5, MSAU-2.
3 SC: Dep. c.355, box 5, MSAU-3.
4 Royal Society of London Library/RSL: Herschel Papers, 2.378; J. F. W. Herschel to Mary Somerville, 14 March 1869.
5 In Women of Letters, an AMS Reprint Series (New York: AMS Press, 1975).
6 SC: Dep. c.355, box 5, MSAU-2, 1.
7 Somerville Collection, Dep. c.358, box 8, MSFP-19: Frances Power Cobbe to Martha Somerville, Jul. 11 [1873].
8 Elizabeth Chambers Patterson, Mary Somerville, 1780–1872 (Oxford: Somerville College, 1979).
9 Patterson, Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science, 1815– 1840 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983). All further references will be to ‘EP’ with page number/s.
10 Indeed, in her reply to his letter Mary Somerville indicates that she has already taken his advice, having struck out passages and added ‘a number of anecdotes of people and things illustrative of the times which will make it more amusing, and others may occur to me as the MS will not be printed till after my death’ (RSL: Herschel Papers, 2.379: Mary Somerville to Herschel, 23 March 1869).
11 It is clear, of course, that a poor lower-class woman could never have done what Mary Somerville did. Success in any intellectual field for working-class women was almost impossible, but in scientific fields it was unthinkable.
12 It must be noted, however, that Italian civility did not extend to allowing a woman into the observatory of the Collegio Romano without an order from the Pope (see p. 193).
13 Perhaps the most egregious example of a disparaging and ignorant review is of The Mechanism of the Heavens in the Athenaeum. Its fire is so scattered as to be ineffective but it displays an unexplained animus against learned women or, as the reviewer would have it, would-be learned women: Athenaeum, 221 (1832), 43–44.
14 Saturday Review, 7 Dec. 1872, 721–2, p.722.
15 William Whewell, review of Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 1834: Quarterly Review, li (1834), 154–171.
16 Maria Edgeworth reports in a letter to her mother in 1822 that Mary Somerville had a ‘remarkably soft voice though speaking with a strong Scottish pronunciation – yet it is a well-bred Scotch not like the Baillies’: Maria Edgeworth, Letters from England, 1813–1844, ed. Christina Colvin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
17 SC: Dep. c.362, box 12, MSIF-10; Mary Somerville to Mary C. Somerville, 19 Sept. 1837 (postmarked: Kelso, 20 Sept. 1837). It seems clear that at this point Mary Somerville was staying with her husband’s family and her own acquired virtue in comparison.
18 SC: Dep. c.357, box 7, MSFP-2; Margaret Charters Fairfax to Mary Somerville.
19 SC: Dep. c.355, box 5, MSAU-2, 150.
20 See John Appleby, ‘Woronzow Greig (1805–1865), F. R. S., and his Scientific Interests’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 53:1 (1999), 95–107.
21 SC, Dep. c.357, box 7 MSFP-2; Margaret Charters Fairfax to Mary Somerville, 15 July 1831.
22 The story may be pieced together from letters in the Somerville Collection, Dep. c.357, box 7, MSFP-11, 13 letters from Mary Somerville to James Graham [Agnes Greig’s brother] and 18 letters from James Graham to Mary Somerville. It should be stressed that no one acted in any way dishonourably in the affair; Woronzow probably simply put off the moment of revelation and then everyone suffered the tragic nuisance of his sudden death.
23 Herschel Papers, 2.378, 14 March 1869.
24 St Augustine.
Elizabeth Patterson points out that the published Personal Recollections include errors of date etc. Some of these are, I think, interesting in themselves, as an old woman looks back over what has constituted her life and times and some, indeed, turn out not to be errors after all (see note 44). In some cases, Mary Somerville cannot herself remember exactly when things happened but what she does know, in a way that the accurate dates cannot in themselves provide for us, is how it felt to those living at the time when extraordinary things happened. There are a number of places in the Recollections where Mary Somerville tells her readers that she cannot remember exactly when things occurred. This is, of course, a favourite trope of writers of autobiography to get them off the hook of falsification, which they know is always lurking for the memoirist, but it seems to me legitimate in that it retains