ABSTRACT
Mary Somerville (1780-1872), the best-known female mathematician of the nineteenth century, after whom Somerville College, Oxford, was named, grew up in Burntisland, near Edinburgh, and was the daughter of a vice-admiral, Sir William Fairfax, and his second wife, Margaret Charters, Like most Victorian women autobiographers, she was deeply dissatisfied with her formal education, and learnt more by private reading and cadging lessons from male tutors. She married twice - on each occasion a cousin, the first of whom, Samuel Greig, was unsympathetic to her scientific interests. Greig died in 1807, leaving her with two sons; five years later, she married another cousin, William Somerville, who was an army doctor. This was a much more successful marriage intellectually. Moving to London in 1816, she entered the scientific community, and attracted excited attention with her 1831 English version of Laplace's Mécanique Celeste. As a public persona, Mrs Somerville was admired even more for her ladylike behaviour as a wife and mother whose scientific accomplishments apparently took second place to the smooth running of her home, and she was often cited as an example of the ideal woman in contrast to the 'shrieking sisterhood' of the mid-Victorian period. Yet the child, Mary Fairfax, frustrated by not being allowed to read freely or acquire a sound education (something she remedied with her own two daughters), presents herself as an angry rebel, alternately afraid of the dark and determined to educate herself by whatever means came to hand.
