Anita Siegfried

It calls itself a novel, but it reads almost like a biography. The rich details of the subject's daily life and conversations are surely invented, but from what I can judge it is historically highly accurate. The subject is Ada Lovelace, who published a long article on Babbage's Analytic Engine, and in the course of illustrating its capabilities became the first person ever to write a computer program. She was incidentally also the daughter of Lord Byron - "incidentally" with respect to her scientific achievements, but clearly not with respect to her personal life. She was torn between her father's romanticism, and its opposite, mathematics. Her mathematical genius was fed by an active imagination, inherited from her father, but she also succumbed to the same moral dissolution: addiction to gambling, extramarital affairs, neglect of her children.… (mer)