Queen Of Science. Somerville Mary

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СКАЧАТЬ 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:

It is not invidious, still less discourteous, in us to say that the one is to the other as moonlight is to sunlight. Receptive, bright and keen, the mind of woman may give back or diffuse the rays of knowledge for the source or emanation of which a stronger and more original power is necessary.14

In the light of Mary Somerville’s resigned, even depressed, acquiescence in the secondary position of women as innovative scientists, it is obviously important that John Couch Adams told her husband that it was a suggestion from On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences that put it into his head to calculate the orbit of Neptune. Furthermore it was the impact of Mary Somerville’s Connexion of the Physical Sciences that produced the word ‘scientist’ in the first place. Reviewing the book in the Quarterly, William Whewell speaks of Mary Somerville’s laudable insistence on connection at a time when there was an ‘increasing proclivity to separation and dismemberment’ in the sciences and he proposes the use of a new term, one possibility being ‘scientist’, on the model of ‘artist, sciolist, economist and atheist’.15 It is also in this review that Whewell rehearses arguments about female and male intellect that are with us still. He does believe that ‘there is a sex in minds’ and while he does not simply privilege male over female, the sex of his own mind is never far away:

      One of the characteristics of the female intellect is a clearness of perception as far as it goes; with them action is the result of feeling; thought of seeing; their practical emotions do not wait for instruction from speculation; their reasoning is undisturbed by the prospect of its practical consequences. (QR, 65)

      Diminishing though this seems, Whewell plucks out of it a kind of victory for female intellect:

      But, from the peculiar mental character to which we have referred, it follows, that when women are philosophers, they are likely to be lucid ones; that when they extend the range of their speculative views, there will be a peculiar illumination thrown over the prospect. If they attain to the merit of being profound, they will add to this the great excellence of being also clear. (QR, 66)

      Yet, as soon as difference is admitted, and both men and women at the time did admit it, it becomes impossible within the historical context to do other than privilege the male in the very act of elevating the female. It cannot really be denied that in spite of all the attention and assistance that Mary Somerville received and the accolades she won, this was still a man’s world. With the exceptions of Mary Somerville herself and Ada Lovelace, most of the other women involved in the scientific world were involved because of the assistance they gave their husbands or because, like Jane Marcet, they were popularisers in a way that Mary Somerville never was. Yet it was Jane Marcet who first inspired Faraday (p. 92), and that is surely something. But Mrs Kater, Mrs Sabine, Mrs Lyell gave their devoted services to their husbands and are remembered as helpmeets, although Elizabeth Sabine translated Humboldt’s Kosmos. Sometimes, indeed, it has been necessary, as with Mrs Lowry, to go to a biography of a husband to get any information about a wife. In this sense, Mary Somerville is assisted by not having had a scientific partner.

      The public honours she received, although numerous and welcome, were also usually secondary: she was generally an honorary, not a full, member of learned societies. When Herschel writes to William Somerville (p. 175) that he hears that a recent vote of the Astronomical Society makes Mary Somerville his colleague he is exaggerating, since her membership of the Society, like that of his aunt, Caroline Herschel, was an honorary one. Nevertheless, Mary Somerville’s pension from the Civil List was in line with the awards made to her male contemporaries: she received, as she explains (p. 144), £200 from Robert Peel’s administration and when the succeeding Whig administration added £100 to this, Mary Somerville was in receipt of an amount equivalent to the pensions of Airy, Faraday and Brewster among others (EP, 161).

      THE SCOTSWOMAN:

      Whewell concludes his review by quoting the verses that I have chosen as my epigraph, which compare Mary Somerville to Hypatia and Madame Agnesi, the only two earlier women believed to be distinguished in mathematics: ‘Three women in three different ages born, /Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.’ Accepting the justice of the claim, Whewell, nevertheless, points out that Madame Agnesi and Mary Somerville were born in the same century and that, ‘though Hypatia talked Greek as Mrs Somerville does English, the former was an Egyptian, and the latter, we are obliged to confess, is Scotch by her birth, though we are very happy to claim her as one of the brightest ornaments of England’ (QR, 68). Mary Somerville was a Scot living outside Scotland at a time when nationality was a peculiarly pressing issue and the positioning of an intellectual north or south of the border was a contentious business. For example, if Mary Somerville could not have been great without leaving Scotland, we might well feel that Scott could not have been great if he had done. But Scott died the year after the Mechanism of the Heavens was published. Scotland’s intellectual heyday was fading despite the continued ascendancy of ‘Scotch Reviewers’.

Mary Somerville’s relationship with her native country was complex. Her closeness to Joanna Baillie may well have derived from the shared sense of both being and not being Scottish. They both retained their Scottish accents: Joanna Baillie’s was apparently even more marked,16 but Mary Somerville was always self-conscious about her accent (p. 97). However far she travelled physically and intellectually from her native land, she carried its continued impress in her speech.

      Her religious sense too was shaped by Scotland, both in what underpinned it and in what she rejected. Her love for the natural world, which affected every aspect of her personal and professional life, came out of her early years in Burntisland and Jedburgh. As is, of course, very often the case with memoirs, the sections which deal with childhood experiences are among the most vivid and most moving. It is from these early experiences that she derived a feeling for the history inherent in things and places that anchors her to the beauties of the living world:

      Some of the plum and pear trees were very old, and were said to have been planted by the monks. Both were excellent in quality, and very productive. […] The precipitous banks of red sandstone are richly clothed with vegetation, some of the trees ancient and very fine, especially the magnificent one called the capon tree, and the lofty king of the wood, remnants СКАЧАТЬ