The Enchantress of Numbers is a fictional retelling of Ada Lovelace’s life, narrated by a fictional version of herself. As far as I can tell, it’s quite faithful to the events of Ada’s life and the relationship between her and her mother. However, as the book progresses, it starts to skim over her vices and dwell on Ada as a good wife and mother who wants to do math but also do her motherly duties. The story ends with nice emotional resolutions, but for those who are familiar with her whole biography it cuts off suddenly.

Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Their marriage was a short, cruel, and sad demonstration of why one should not marry a “Bad Boy” with the intent to fix him. Once Annabella gave birth to Ada, she fled and she and Byron lived separately for the rest of Lord Byron’s short life. Annabella was terrified that Ada might have “bad blood” from her father, so she decreed that Ada would study science and math, but not poetry or most kinds of fiction.

Much of Ada’s life consisted of battling with her mother. Ada’s mother feared that Ada would inherit Byron’s mental illness and watched Ada intently for any sign of eccentricity or “mania.” The book does a good job of showing a relationship that was at times distant and at others close, one that was usually adversarial, and one that was somewhat mirrored in Ada’s own parenting difficulties. The relationship between Ada and her mother is the central one of the book.

Ada became a brilliant mathematician. She is often referred to as the world’s first computer programmer thanks to her collaboration with William Babbage, inventor of the Difference Engine. The Enchantress of Numbers explores Ada’s life and her (platonic) relationship with Babbage. The language is good, the story flows well, the imagery is wonderful. I don’t know what Ada was like in real life, but the cadence of the book feels like I imagined her to be.

The book is odd in one respect, which is that it elides many of Ada’s serious problems. It refers to Ada’s gambling addiction, but only briefly, whereas in life that addiction consumed much of her time and energy and was a serious problem in her life (full disclosure – biographers argue about how much of this was true and how much rumor).

It also minimizes her mood swings. Ada spent so long fighting cancer that to leave it out of her story feels incomplete. During her illness, she told something to her husband that enraged him – what was it? That scene could have been portrayed in such a way as to avoid speculation, and by all accounts it was plenty dramatic. Charles Dickens read to her – who wouldn’t want to read that?

Towards the end of her life, Ada writes an article (at the time, such an article was called a memoir). She says:

“In writing the memoir, I had discovered something astonishing about myself-that my genius resided in my ability to synthesize abstract ideas, to marry the intellect and the imagination into a new kind of insight.That was why I understood the capabilities of the Analytical Engine even better than its inventor did. That was why I had never been able to repudiate my father, despite the ominous warnings about the bad Byron blood that had been drummed into my consciousness since childhood. All my life I had been told that I must choose between my mother or my father, the intellect or the imagination. Now I knew that I was nothing without both.”

Even though I felt that this book shortchanged aspects of Ada’s life and personality, I thought that this paragraph was a brilliant summation of Ada’s contribution to mathematics in general and to the Difference Engine specifically. It also indicates something that I often find to be true – the qualities we perceive as negative in some situations are positive in others. Ada did not invent the Analytical Engine, but she was even more adept than its inventor in imagining what such a machine might accomplish.