This book certainly helped me to put Ada's life in a larger perspective-- I was surprised to find how little emphasis was put on her work with Babbage and his Analytical Engine. The breadth and variety of Ada's experiences leads to quite a long biography, with the amount of time devoted to each part of her life dependent not just on the interest of the biographer but also largely on the amount of remaining documentation. Overall, I thought it was pretty well balanced. When starting the book it seemed at first that too much time was spent with her parents, but as I continued it became clear what an enormous effect their separation and Lord Byron's celebrity had on Ada throughout her life, and in retrospect I think it was page space well spent.

I thought Woolley did a good job of transporting the reader into the historical time period and Ada's mentality specifically -- for example, once he mentions that Ada called her mother's cadre of morally acceptable friends "the Furies", they are never referred to as anything else. He gives a lot of good background on certain fads and technological developments that shaped the era, though sometimes to the point of straying a little too far from Ada herself. Additionally I think that his face-value use of the idea of "hysteria" was accurate to Ada's own conception of herself but could have used some of that historical context treatment.
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Ada Lovelace, the only child (legitimate) of Lord Bryon. Her tale is a sad, horrible one. An intelligent woman in a time when women weren't allowed to do their own research, but was allowed to study men's work and comment.

This history of Ada and her family was well written. At times a bit dry, but well researched. The author is very clear on where he had conjectured what had happened, always noting on what sources he was using to make the conjecture.

I do not know much about Ada, Lord Bryon, or Annabell, so I don't know if these people are written truly. It seems like everyone involved is over the top - Ada being a bit flighty and a dilettante.

Its an interesting time period. The tension between art versus science, belief vs intellectualism. Its a good book for a slice of life story of a affluent woman in the 1850's. ( )

Ada Byron Lovelace, daughter of the infamous poet and credited with writing the first computer algorithm (over a century before the first computer was ever built), is truly the stuff of historical biographies. Benjamin Woolley rubs some of the shine from her posthumous reputation in his bid to portray a fair and accurate representation of her life, but really, romance novelists would struggle to pen such an original character. Talented but tragic father, cold and calculating mother, scandalous cousin, and a host of well-known acquaintances, including Messrs. Babbage and Dickens. Like an intelligent Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Ada's personal life fills more pages than her 'professional' achievements.

The first few chapters are given over to the ill-fated match between Byron and Ada's mother, Annabella. Byron called her 'the Princess of Parallelograms', but Woolley shoots down her mathematical genius ('She did not have any special expertise'). After Byron's death, Annabella kept her daughter sequestered from society, with only books and tutors to divert her from her father's creative inheritance. Really, Ada's greatest achievement was surviving her manipulative mother, not inventing a computing code! The background to Babbage's Difference Engine - post-French Revolution statistics - is interesting, but according to Woolley, Ada's contribution was limited. 'She did not challenge the system - She did what she did on behalf of herself, not her sex', he writes.

I think I was expecting far more of Ada, but she married, had three children, an affair and a gambling addiction, and died relatively young, reminding me of Georgiana Cavendish. She was intelligent, yes, and had the means and the connections to test her mental agility and creativity, but I wasn't exactly overawed by her achievements. 'In more contemporary terms, it would be like nominating Lisa-Marie Presley to annotate a study of quantum computation', is Woolley's pithy summary of her work with Babbage. ( )

This is a biography of Ada Lovelace, the "first computer scientist" (sort of) and daughter of Annabella Milbanke and Lord Byron, although it includes at least as much material on Annabella as on Ada. Annabella comes across as being so horrible but also so smugly self-deluded into thinking she was selfless and right-thinking that I sort of love her? I mean, she was terrible, but I feel like if I married a celebrity and then found out he was having an affair with his own sister I would also probably react with some vindictiveness.

This book feels a little hyperbolic in places, but I enjoyed the descriptions of all the other recognisable figures whose paths crossed (or almost crossed) with Ada's - Babbage, of course, but also Dickens, Brunel, etc. - and the scientific "fads" she was caught up in, particularly mesmerism and atmospheric railways.

I also enjoyed reading about Ada getting frustrated while trying to write a paper. I feel your pain! ;_;

Minus half a star for the ridiculous number of typos and missing/misplaced articles. ( )

Very well-written and readable, this book starts with the compelling train-wreck that was the marriage of Lord Byron to a prim and controlling intellectual, and moves on from there. Poor Ada was not even allowed to look at a portrait of her father until she was safely grown up and married, and her distant mother came down hard on her for anything that looked even slightly like the sort of thing her father might do. But then she did enjoy the mathematics which was medically prescribed for her as the opposite of romanticism. As an adult she was one of the very few people to understand what Babbage was on about with his Difference Engine, making her a century ahead of her time, and she wrote an article which included the first ever published computer program. An interesting life. ( )