The Land of Nowhere

Just finished this (now free on Google books, thank you public domain!), and have a grin on my face.

Evelyn Sharp wants you to know all about her late friend Hertha Ayrton, who was SO COOL -- which can be a hard thing to get across in a book, because you have to take her word on how charming Hertha was in person -- but it generally works, because Hertha Ayrton was very cool! If you liked Marie Brennan's Lady Trent, you'll probably like Hertha Ayrton. (Less hijinks, but there was that one time that Evelyn and Hertha had to move the contents of the WSPU's bank account out of the country before the British government could seize it: "She was full of resource as I expected to find her, and as much unruffled by my news as if she had been engaged all her life in executing commissions of doubtful legality for friends whom the law dubbed conspirators.")

The memoir is, of course, dated in some ways: I was somewhat less interested in the parts towards the beginning where Sharp tells us about how Ayrton met various people who were apparently Big Literary Names -- there's one bit where Sharp mentions Miss De Morgan, sister of the novelist, where I would have said daughter of the logician. But there's plenty of interesting detail in there also, if you don't mind that the narrative arc is often interrupted by, e. g., a poem by 7-year-old Hilaire Belloc! But the pacing picks up towards the end, with the focus on science and suffrage, and Sharp ends the on a high note despite the frustrations of Ayrton's later years.

It holds up well in terms of cultural attitudes: Hertha Ayrton's egalitarianism comes across clearly, even when it encounters disagreement from some of her friends. I also didn't find anything problematic with the book's handling of Jewish characters (Hertha was a Jew who turned agnostic and married a Christian but always kept pride in her Jewish identity). On the other hand, of the two brief mentions of unnamed black people in the book, neither are flattering.

(Also there's a historically interesting bit where Hertha expresses to her mentor her doubts on the issue of "foeticide", which many suffragists of that time objected to on health of the mother grounds, but Hertha doesn't see what harm it does. Edited: see oursin's comment for historical context.)

A bit for the f/f shippers: (context: Sarah, as Hertha was called at the time, is being courted by her cousin Marcus, who takes her to a party where she meets Ottilie Blind)

"It was her spontaneous and romantic admiration for Ottilie that settled in Sarah's mind the question of her feeling for Marcus; for finding to her surprise that she was just as much interested in her new girl friend as she had been in him and considerably more at ease in her company, Sarah faced the matter squarely and deduced the logical conclusion that she was not and never had been in love with Marcus."

I would have liked to hear more about Hertha's lifelong friendship with Ottilie Blind Hancock, who gave her the name "Hertha", and who endowed a fellowship in her name after her death: Ottilie shows up throughout the biography, but mainly in the background. Another background character I would like to know more about is C. E. Greenslade, Hertha's lab assistant (who started out as Hertha's husband's student, then his lab assistant, and then somehow managed to juggle being a lecturer in Cork, Ireland with assisting Hertha in her lab research).

Anyway, I'm very glad to have read this book, and hope it will be better known -- and also that Hertha someday gets the modern biography she deserves. I may also have to look into more Evelyn Sharp -- she seems to have a bunch of children's books in the public domain, as well as an autobiography from 1933 that was recently republished.

The Dragon Reborn, Robert Jordan. Still enjoying this! Most of the way through, and we just got introduced to a bunch of interesting new female characters.

Pure and Practical Women:
Mathematics, Science and Gender around 1900, with special reference to
Grace Chisholm Young and Hertha Ayrton, Claire Jones (link to download from British Library, also the author also has a published book based on this thesis).

So every so often I get reminded that I want steampunk Hertha Ayrton, and then I sometimes fall down a rabbit hole of research, as one does. This time I discovered this Ph.D. thesis, which features Hertha Ayrton and Grace Chisholm Young, two women who were written out of the history of science/math for different reasons (and have recently started being written back in). The book has a lot of fascinating background details, especially about Cambridge women's colleges and the examination culture in the Victorian era, but it's a dissertation on gender, not a comprehensive biography of either woman, and reading it cover-to-cover got to be a bit All Gender All the Time, when I really wanted to get to know these interesting women.

Hertha Ayrton really deserves a good book-length biography, but that's not what this book is trying to be. (I'm curious now and want to find the memoir of her written by her friend Evelyn Sharp, which was published in 1926, so should be in the public domain now, but Google books is only giving me snippets! I'm going to look into how to request that Google make its copy freely available.)

Also I should learn more about Grace Chisholm Young, a mathematician I'd been only vaguely aware of because a) she worked in parts of math that I'm less familiar with and b) she sacrified her own career to support her husband's.

The Eye of the World -- reread in preparation for the Netflix series (on my previous try of the series I got a book and a half in). Rand and Mat just made it to Caemlyn. Generally enjoyable, a bit much POV from teenage boys who believe in male superiority -- to be fair, the women in this book believe in female superiority, and seem to be often right, but we are not getting as much of their POV so far.

Oral history interview with Lucy Slater. Today was one of these days when I fall down a rabbit hole of investigating a 20th century female mathematician I see mentioned, and Lucy Slater is fascinating. Homeschooled by her suffragette mother after her naval chemist father's early death, she came of age during the Blitz and programmed some of the first computers. Recommended.

Vaguely prompted by skygiants's post on Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's race around the world, I've been thinking about badass women of the late 19th century, and remembered Hertha Ayrton, who I think should be used in steampunk way more than she is.

"Who is Hertha Ayrton?" you are probably asking. I actually didn't know about her until I went to a museum exhibit fairly recently.

( Zombie Marie Curie wants you to be one of today's lucky ten thousand! )

And yet, despite all this, I've never seen her represented in fiction, even though she seems a natural fit for steampunk. She got a Google doodle, and there are a couple steampunk-themed games that have her as a character, but really, that's it. But there are so many possibilities: arc lamp pyrotechnics! action scenes in the air/water where she harnesses the power of vortices! alternate history where Ayrton fans were in widespread use! And to be honest, I'm getting a little tired of Ada Lovelace being the one female historical character in Victorian-set fantasy, and would like to see more representation of women who grew up in humbler backgrounds.

Though, actually, when researching this I learned that there is actually *one* novel based on Hertha Ayrton's life: The Call by her stepdaughter Edith Ayrton Zangwill about a woman scientist and suffragist. I should read it and see if it's any good!