Mary Somerville

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Standard Name: Somerville, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Fairfax
Married Name: Mary Greig
Married Name: Mary Somerville
Eminent Scottish mathematician and scientist MS was best known as the author of four popular expository texts on science: Mechanism of the Heavens (1831), On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), Physical Geography (1848), and On Molecular and Microscopic Science (1869). She also published the results of three of her experiments, an article on Halley's comet, and an autobiography.
Image from head-and-shoulders chalk drawing of Mary Somerville by James Rannie Swinton, 1848. She looks down, away from the viewer, wearing a white scarf and white ruffled cap, her dark smooth hair parted in the middle and pulled back. This was engraved as frontispiece to her "Physical Geography", vol. i, 1848.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Henry Peter Baron Brougham
Brougham had a number of friends among women writers. He was at primary school in Edinburgh with Susan Ferrier (who, however, declined to acknowledge him later, probably for political reasons). His political work brought him...
Friends, Associates Augusta Ada Byron
AAB became friendly with and sought mathematical guidance from Mary Somerville .
Patterson, Elizabeth Chambers. Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science, 1815-1840. Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.
148-9
Friends, Associates Maria Grey
The Shirreffs were a sociable family whose friends and acquaintances were varied. The scientist Mary Somerville , geologist Sir Charles Lyell , and Sir William Grove , inventor of the Grove battery, were numbered among...
Instructor Augusta Ada Byron
Lady Byron employed a number of governesses to educate the young AAB at their various country homes. From the age of five Ada received full-time instruction in arithmetic, grammar, spelling, reading, music, geography, drawing, and...
Intertextuality and Influence Maria Elizabetha Jacson
Ann B. Shteir considers that the confident tone and command of materialhere anticipate Mary Somerville 's much more advanced scientific expositions of the 1830s, but that again the tone did not perfectly match the...
Occupation Mary Augusta Ward
It was she who made the suggestion that the Oxford women's hall should be named after mathematician and scientist Mary Somerville . She worked furiously for the project until October 1879, when the new college...
politics Jessie Boucherett
An active suffragist, JB helped (with a committee whose members included Harriet Martineau , Frances Power Cobbe and Mary Somerville ) to organize the suffrage petition presented to Parliament on 7 June.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Publishing Lucy Walford
LW 's lives of Jane Taylor , Elizabeth Fry , Hannah More , and Mary Somerville , each originally printed in Blackwood's Magazine, appeared together as Four Biographies from Blackwood in Edinburgh and London.
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Reception Caroline Herschel
In old age CH was loaded with other honours, including honorary membership in the Royal Astronomical Society , along with Mary Somerville , in 1835. (Each woman said she felt it a particular honour to...
Reception Agnes Mary Clerke
She was admitted at the same time as Lady Huggins , who wrote a tribute to her following her death.
Commire, Anne, and Deborah Klezmer, editors. Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Yorkin Publications, 1999–2002, 17 vols.
832
The three women who had been previously admitted into the Society were Caroline Herschel
Reception Mary Russell Mitford
She contacted several people (including the novelist Lady Dacre and the Whig hostess and diarist Lady Holland ) for support in her application, which was fuelled by the examples of the pensions granted to Sydney Morgan
Reception Sydney Owenson Lady Morgan
Lord Melbourne offered Sydney, Lady Morgan , a Crown pension of three hundred pounds a year; she gladly accepted. She had been a close and supportive friend of Melbourne's first wife, Lady Caroline Lamb ...
Residence Jane Welsh Carlyle
Mary Somerville and her family and Leigh Hunt and his were neighbours of the Carlyles in Chelsea.
Carlyle, Jane Welsh. Jane Welsh Carlyle: A New Selection of Her Letters. Editor Bliss, Trudy, Victor Gollancz, 1950.
48
Textual Features Millicent Garrett Fawcett
Her authors run from Jane Austen and some contemporaries to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Martineau . Elizabeth Fry , Mary Carpenter , and Florence Nightingale represent philanthropy, Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville science, and...
Textual Production Elizabeth Rigby
Editor John Gibson Lockhart (who became a close friend) invited her to write for the periodical after being introduced to her work by John Murray . She was only the second woman to publish in...

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