It wasn’t until a few years ago, researching important women in history, that I started to find out about Ada Lovelace. I was instantly intrigued, both by what Ada achieved in her short life - she is well-known now for her work with the inventor Charles Babbage - but also by who she was. Her father was the poet Lord Byron, who had famously been dubbed ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’; her mother was an heiress and talented mathematician called Annabella Milbanke. How could these people, in combination, have produced a child who would end up being so pivotal to the development of computer science? What kind of person was Ada really? To learn more about her, and to write the book that became I, Ada, felt like an irresistible prospect.
Ada Lovelace was born
Augusta Ada Byron on the tenth of December, 1815. She was twenty-six when she
was commissioned to translate an essay about Babbage’s Analytical Engine from French
into English. To this, Ada added copious notes of her own, further explaining
the potential of the machine. She outlined its ability not only to make
calculations but to utilise them for other calculations, speculating that in
time the machine could be used to create things such as music. It was an
extraordinary piece of work for a young mother of three, and all the more
extraordinary for her inclusion of a table that is now recognised as being a machine-based algorithm
- the first of its kind.
I, Ada by Julia Gray
As my book would be primarily for a young adult audience, I knew that the story I would write would take place earlier than that. I was excited by the challenge of trying to tell the story of Ada’s childhood and her teenage years in a way that could explore just how she might have come to do what she did later on.
I decided to structure the book as a sequence of flashbacks, written in the vivid present, detailing scenes from Ada’s life from age five onwards. I took inspiration for my overarching storyline from Margaret Carpenter’s portrait of Ada, which was painted when Ada was pregnant with her first child. I imagined that Ada, together with her husband, William, and her mother, had gone to see it at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Now aged twenty, Ada comes face to face with the finished portrait, and this sparks a question - who is she, and what sort of person does she really want to be? A wife and a mother, or something more? Going for a walk across Waterloo bridge, she catches sight of a rainbow (rainbows were a much-loved part of her childhood), and begins to reminisce about her life. I pictured a scene - Ada and her mother on a beach in Brighton, and some gossipy women staring and whispering about ‘Lord Byron’s daughter’.
Author Julia Gray in front of Margaret Carpenter's portrait of Ada Lovelace
But before I could write anything down, I had a lot of work to do. I read every biography of Ada - as well as quite a few about Annabella and Byron - that I could get my hands on, and I used the bibliographies in those books to fuel further reading lists. Gradually, I was able to construct a timeline of Ada’s life. It wasn’t easy - not every biography contained much detail about her childhood and teenage years, and quite often I came across omissions, or stories that conflicted. But after a few months I had a collection of scenes that I knew I wanted to include.
I had never written a book that occupied the space between fiction and non-fiction before; at first I felt constrained by the things that I didn’t know, but gradually I realised that by reading around each subject I could fill in the blanks. (I sometimes compared this to the way the scientists in Jurassic Park used frog DNA when attempting to sequence their dinosaurs…) Food, architecture, clothing, the history of teaching maths… I went down rabbit-hole after rabbit-hole in search of facts and usable details. After I reached a kind of rabbit-hole saturation point, I started writing.
My previous two books had been contemporary fiction and each time I had struggled with some element of them - either the plot, or the voices. Because I had a clear timeline in my head and a clear goal - to attempt to see the world through Ada’s eyes - I actually found the writing of I, Ada a little easier. But often I still had blanks that I needed to fill in.
Two experiences helped enormously when writing I, Ada. The first was visiting the Lovelace Byron archives at the Bodleian library in Oxford. Here there are boxes and boxes of meticulously organised papers: legal documents, letters, diaries, notebooks… When I first held a letter from Byron to Annabella in my hands, and examined the tiny, ornate writing, I felt a ripple of electricity so powerful that I can still remember it now. Just holding those artefacts made the whole thing seem incredibly real. I also unearthed valuable gems like an inventory of all the furniture in Kirkby Mallory, Ada’s childhood home - it even said which wines were in the cellar! My second helpful discovery was the British Newspaper Archive. Suddenly I could read contemporary articles about places and people in Ada’s life - vital primary sources - and was able to describe scenes like the balls she attended as a debutante, or the zoological gardens, in far more detail.
My lasting impression of Ada was of a young woman with a fierce desire to achieve something worthwhile; a woman whose imagination was boundless and whose determination was immense. Although plenty of obstacles stood in her way, from ill-health to an overbearing (though well-wishing) mother, Ada refused to let anything stop her from doing what she wanted to do. She died aged thirty-six without realising the importance of her work, but I am so glad that she is celebrated today - for example, in Women’s History Month - and given the credit she rightly deserves.
Julia Gray is a writer and singer-songwriter.
I, Ada was highly commended in the Young Quills Awards in the 14 years + / young adult category.
http://www.thisisjuliagray.com/
