Enchantress of numbers: A Novel of Ada Lovelace, by Jennifer Chiaverini

Ada Byron Lovelace was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, from his brief marriage to her mathematician mother, Annabella.  After Byron scandalously abandoned the family soon after Ada was born, he never saw either again.  Annabella is determined that her precocious and brilliant child will avoid the madness of the her father’s family (Byron was famously called, “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” and his father was known as “Mad Jack”) so shields her from all fairy tales and fantasy.  But from the age of four, Ada is carefully educated in languages and the sciences and will prove to have a unique mind.  Her mother is often away and Ada is left with various caretakers and teachers so feels abandoned and unloved.  She and her mother engaged in a life-long struggle for dominance which will also shape Ada’s world.  After she comes out in society at eighteen, she meets Charles Babbage, inventor of the “Difference Engine,” a huge, cog-driven ur-computer.  It is Ada who will figure out that using  punch cards, which she observed in factories producing jacquard weaving, will solve the problems inherent in the mechanical machine’s limitations.  She will not be recognized for her contributions and insights until 1953, a hundred years after her death at the young age of 36.  The novel has rich material in the famous and fascinating historical characters.  But it proved to be too rich in research for me.  Every visit to a relative in a far-flung castle or stately home, every social call, every visit to a spa by Ada’s hypochondriac mother, is detailed. which slows the narrative down to a crawl. It finally limps to an anticlimatic, mercifully short, depiction of Ada's marriage, childbearing, and death.  Chiaverini is a talented writer and this is an interesting and timely story, however, it was badly in need of an editor.  430 pp.