Even while mired in debt from gambling and crippled by cancer, she was frenetically employing Faraday's experiments with light refraction to explore the analysis of distant stars. When Ada died - like her father, she was only 36 - great things seemed still to lie ahead for her as a passionate astronomer. As an exuberant and boldly unconventional young woman, she amplified her explanations of Charles Babbage's unbuilt calculating engine to predict, as nobody would do for another century, the dawn today of our modern computer age. As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a steam-driven flying horse. Educated by some of the most learned minds in England, she combined that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart and a visionary imagination. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron's little girl was introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet.

Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. A Sunday Times Book of the Year Shortlisted for The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 'This magnificent, highly readable double biography.brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to life' The Financial Times 'A gripping saga of a double-biography' Daily Mail 'A masterful portrait' The Times 'Vastly enjoyable' Literary Review 'Deeply absorbing and meticulously researched' The Oldie In 1815, the clever, courted and cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron.

In Byron's Wake by Miranda Seymour