By its very nature the historical record is especially incomplete where intimate conversations and private thoughts are concerned. Whenever I invent such scenes, I do my best to remain true to what I know of the real, historical people while scripting imagined lives to depict all that I don’t know.
Chapter titles in Enchantress of Numbers were inspired by verses from the poems of Lord Byron:
Prologue: “My Way Is to Begin with the Beginning”
Don Juan, Canto the First, VII
Chapter One: “Sole Daughter of My House and Heart”
Childe Harold, Canto the Third, I
Chapter Two: “I Know That Thou Wilt Love Me”
Childe Harold, Canto the Third, CXVII
Chapter Three: “Dull Hate as Duty Should Be Taught”
Childe Harold, Canto the Third, CXVII
Chapter Four: “Smiles Form the Channel of a Future Tear”
Childe Harold, Canto the Second, XCVII
Chapter Five: “Wishing Each Other, Not Divorced, but Dead”
Don Juan, Canto the First, XXVI
Chapter Six: “Sharp Is the Knife, and Sudden Is the Stroke”
Childe Harold, Canto the First, L
Chapter Seven: “New Shores Descried Make Every Bosom Gay”
Childe Harold, Canto the First, XIV
Chapter Eight: “More Restless Than the Swallow in the Skies”
Childe Harold, Canto the First, XXVII
Chapter Nine: “As a Wild-Born Falcon with Clipt Wing”
Childe Harold, Canto the Third, XV
Chapter Ten: “Who Would Be Free Themselves Must Strike the Blow”
Childe Harold, Canto the Second, LXXVI
Chapter Eleven: “But Sweeter Still Than This, Than These, Than All, Is First and Passionate Love”
Don Juan, Canto the First, CXXVII
Chapter Twelve: “Thus the Heart Will Break, Yet Brokenly Live On”
Childe Harold, Canto the Third, XXXII
Chapter Thirteen: “Once Kindled, Quenchless Evermore”
Childe Harold, Canto the Third, XLII
Chapter Fourteen: “What Wondrous New Machines Have Late Been Spinning!”
Don Juan, Canto the First, CXXX
Chapter Fifteen:”The Commencement of Atonement Is the Sense of Its Necessity”
Manfred, Act III Scene I
Chapter Sixteen: “A Mind to Comprehend the Universe”
Manfred, Act II Scene II
Chapter Seventeen: “The Quest of Hidden Knowledge”
Manfred, Act II Scene II
Chapter Eighteen: “With My Knowledge Grew the Thirst of Knowledge”
Manfred, Act II Scene II
Chapter Nineteen: “I Could Not Tame My Nature Down”
Manfred, Act III Scene I
Chapter Twenty: “Links Grace and Harmony in Happiest Chain”
Lara, XX
Chapter Twenty-one: “On with the Dance! Let Joy Be Unconfined”
Childe Harold, Canto the Third, XXII
Chapter Twenty-two: “All Who Joy Would Win Must Share It”
Don Juan, Canto the Second, CLXXII
Chapter Twenty-three: “Days Steal on Us and Steal from Us”
Manfred, Act II Scene II
Chapter Twenty-four: “Rumours Strange, and of Unholy Nature, Are Abroad”
Manfred, Act III Scene I
Chapter Twenty-five: “It Were the Deadliest Sin to Love as We Have Loved”
Manfred, Act II Scene IV
Chapter Twenty-six: “Longings Sublime, and Aspirations High”
Don Juan, Canto the First
Chapter Twenty-seven: “What Is Writ, Is Writ”
Childe Harold, Canto the Fourth, CLXXXV
Chapter Twenty-eight: “Go, Little Book, from This My Solitude”
Don Juan, Canto the First, CCXXII
Chapter Twenty-nine: “What Deep Wounds Ever Closed Without a Scar?”
Childe Harold, Canto the Third, LXXXIV
Chapter Thirty: “A Noble Wreck in Ruinous Perfection”
Manfred, Act III Scene IV
Epilogue: “Hopes Which Will Not Deceive”
Childe Harold, Canto the Third, CXIV
I offer my sincere thanks to Maya Ziv, Maria Massie, Madeline Newquist, Emily Brock, Eileen Chetti, and Elina Vaysbeyn for their contributions to Enchantress of Numbers. I’m grateful for the generous assistance of my first readers, Martin Chiaverini, Geraldine Neidenbach, and Heather Neidenbach, whose insightful comments and questions always prove invaluable. I also thank Nic Neidenbach, Marlene and Len Chiaverini, and other friends and family for their support and encouragement.
I am indebted to the Wisconsin Historical Society and their librarians and staff for maintaining the excellent archives on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, which I rely upon for my research. The sources that most informed this book include:
Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864)
Paul Douglass, Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
James Essinger, Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014)
George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, in Four Volumes (London: John Murray, 1825)
Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982)
Julia Markus, Lady Byron and Her Daughters (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015)
Ethel Colburn Mayne, The Life and Letters of Anne Isabella, Lady Noel Byron, from Unpublished Papers in the Possession of the Late Ralph, Earl of Lovelace (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929)
Ralph Milbanke, Earl of Lovelace, Astarte: A Fragment of Truth Concerning George Gordon Byron, Sixth Lord Byron (London: Christophers, 1921)
Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron’s Legitimate Daughter (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)
Thomas Moore, The Works of Lord Byron, with His Letters and Journals, and His Life (London: John Murray, 1830)
Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, Women in Science: Antiquity Through the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985)
Dorothy Stein, Ada: A Life and a Legacy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy from Its Beginning in 1816 to the Present Time (London: Sampson, Low, Son, and Marston, 1870)
Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron’s Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer (Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press, 1992)
Benjamin Woolley, The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999)
I also consulted several excellent online resources while researching and writing Enchantress of Numbers, including the British Newspaper Archive (http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), Genealogybank.com (http://genealogybank.com), Ancestry (ancestry.com), Newstead Abbey (http://www.newsteadabbey.org.uk), and the Computer History Museum (http://www.computerhistory.org).
Most of all, I thank my husband, Martin Chiaverini, and our sons, Nicholas and Michael, for their enduring love and tireless support. You help me through my most difficult days and make every moment worthwhile, and I love you beyond measure.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JENNIFER CHIAVERINI is the New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, The Spymistress, Mrs. Lincoln’s Rival, Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule, Christmas Bells, Fates and Traitors, and the Elm Creek Quilts series. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, she lives with her husband and two sons in Madison, Wisconsin.
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