An Education Taken Rather Than Given
Mary Fairfax was born at Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders in 1780, the daughter of a naval officer, and received roughly one year of formal schooling at an expensive establishment where she was laced into a back-board and taught almost nothing. She learned to read properly at home and encountered algebra by accident, in a puzzle page in a women's fashion magazine, where the strange symbols meant nothing to her and no one would explain them. A tutor engaged for her brother was persuaded to obtain a copy of Euclid.
Her family regarded the interest as unhealthy. Candles were removed from her room at night, so she worked propositions from memory in the dark. Her first marriage, in 1804 to a cousin, Samuel Greig, brought no encouragement; she later recorded that he had no interest in science of any kind and a low opinion of women's capacity for it. He died in 1807, leaving her financially independent. Her second husband, William Somerville, actively supported her studies and her career. He encouraged her reading and defended it against relatives who thought it improper.
Mechanism of the Heavens
In 1827 Lord Brougham asked her to render Laplace's Mecanique Celeste into English for a general readership. She warned that few in Britain could follow the mathematics and that the task was closer to reconstruction than translation. The result, published in 1831 as Mechanism of the Heavens, supplied the reasoning Laplace had left out and became a textbook for advanced students at Cambridge. It was the work that established her among the first rank of scientific writers in Europe. She was past fifty when it appeared, and the edition sold out quickly.
Her 1834 book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences was more radical in intent, arguing that astronomy, chemistry, optics and heat were aspects of a single enquiry. A passage on the unexplained motion of Uranus was cited by John Couch Adams as an influence on his search for the planet later found as Neptune. Reviewing the book, William Whewell needed a word for practitioners of this unified field and proposed scientist, a coinage generally traced to that review. The term had no settled meaning before that and took decades to displace natural philosopher.
Tutor, Signatory, Namesake
In 1835 the Royal Astronomical Society elected her and Caroline Herschel as its first female honorary members, an honour that carried no right to attend as a full fellow. She could not vote, could not hold a university post, and her bust was placed in the Royal Society's hall by men who would not have admitted her to the room. She lived and worked around those exclusions rather than through them, and wrote about them without self-pity in an autobiography assembled late in life.
She also taught. Among her pupils was the young Ada Byron, whom she guided through mathematics and introduced in 1833 to Charles Babbage, the meeting from which Ada Lovelace's later work on the Analytical Engine descends. At eighty-eight Somerville put her name first to John Stuart Mill's petition for women's suffrage. She died at Naples in 1872, and seven years later the new women's college at Oxford was named for her. She was still correcting proofs in the last year of her life, at ninety-one.
