Free A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age by James Essinger

handwritten pages. Unfortunately, most of the document is illegible; legible handwriting was not regarded as necessary for a gentleman in the early nineteenth century and Greig was a determined gentleman. The biography is often illegible at precisely the moment when it is most interesting.
    My first recollection of Ada Byron about 1832 or 3 is when as a young girl she was a visitor at the house of my mother at the Royal College Chelsea. She was very intimate with Mrs [illegible] who was about her age and as she had even in those early years a decided taste for science which was much approved by Lady Noel Byron [Annabella]….
    Greig continues with an almost photographic glimpse of the teenage Ada:
    She used to lie a great deal in a horizontal position, and she was subject of fits of giddiness, especially when she looked down from any height. As might be expected at this early passage of her life, she had not much conversation. She was reserved and shy, with a good deal of pride and not a little selfishness which developed itself with her advancing years. Her moral courage was remarkable and her determination of character most pronounced.
    Greig’s pages are particularly interesting because Ada completely trusted her lawyer’s discretion, and gave him an unobscured view of her life:
    In afterlife I became very intimate with her; quite as much so as it is possible for persons of different sexes to become consistently with honour. Her communications to me were most unreserved.
    From Greig, then, we learn of Ada’s first love-affair and how she successfully escaped the suffocating shackles of the three furies to be with her first lover, a young tutor.
    A short time before my family became acquainted with Lady Byron and her daughter… the services of a young man, the son of John Hamble… to come for a few hours daily to assist her daughter’s studies.… tenderness soon sprang up between these young people. This was not observed… by Lady B and the three furies.
    Ada had no intention for their love affair to remain pure, and things moved almost to the point of a full ‘connection’:
    …. managed to place in the young man’s hands a scrap of paper appointing an assignation at midnight in one of the outhouses [of Fordhook]. The assignation took place and Ada informed me that matters went as far as they possibly could without connection being completed. After this Ada’s feelings towards the young man naturally became stronger and more uncontrollable.
    The formidable Lady Byron got wind of the friendship, but clearly didn’t have the full measure of what had happened, and soon Ada dramatically and impetuously eloped.
    At length the mother’s eyes were opened and the young man’s visits were discontinued. Driven to madness by disappointment and indignation at the conduct of the furies… Ada fled from her mother’s house to the arms of her lover who was residing at no great distance with his relatives, Lady B’s friends.
    Ada, when a younger girl, once made the mistake of remarking what a beautiful voice she had. ‘Ada,’ Lady Byron responded sharply, ‘do you think you gave yourself your voice?’ There can be little doubt that Lady Byron knew exactly what to do to rein in her daughter and collect her from her hugely-embarrassed friends. A guilt trip is a modern term, but, if Ada’s letter of March 8 1833 is anything to go by, that was unmistakenly her lot.
    Fordhook
    My dear Mama. I must now thank you for your last very kind letter. Though deeply impressed by the ceremony I attended on Sunday for the first & I hope not the last time, certainly I had no inclination to weep. – The more I see & the more I think & reflect, the more convinced do I feel that no person can ever be happy who has not deep religious feeling and does not let that feeling be his guide in all the circumstances of life. Had I entertained my present sentiments two years ago, I should have been now a very different person from what I am. But I