This is a dual biography of Annabella Milbanke and her daughter Ada Lovelace. Ada Lovelace is famous, and is the reason I wanted to read this book. Biographies of Ada don't talk much about her mother, other than to mention that she was married to Lord Byron, the marriage ended badly, and Annabella wanted to make sure that Ada didn't inherit her father's terrible qualities and therefore made sure she had good math tutors to keep her busy.

I'm sure that, like me, most readers who pick up this book will do so because they are interested in Ada. The author, however, is far more interested in Annabella. This can be a bit frustrating if you want to read about Ada, but lots of books have been written about Ada, and Annabella is actually a very interesting woman in her own right. Annabella very competently stood up for herself when it became clear that her marriage was a mistake and her husband was a madman. She consulted with lawyers to get out of the marriage, made sure she had clear legal grounds for doing so, and did everything in her power to secure the future of her daughter. She went on to become an education reformer, using her fortune to fund schools for poor children - she was decades ahead of her time in her ideas about education. She did encourage Ada to learn math, but also encouraged her to write poetry: she wanted to discourage any tendencies to madness or mercurialism that Ada might have inherited from her father, but she also encouraged Byron's good qualities in his daughter, including the incredible sense of imagination that made Ada into such a visionary.

The book tends to skim over Ada's relationship with Babbage, and assumes that the reader is more or less aware of Ada's contribution to the world of technology. Instead, it focuses on Ada's poor health, her relationships with friends and family, and her mercurial personality. If you're looking for analysis of why Ada is important, you will not find it in this book.

Ultimately, what Seymour strives to do in this book is to rescue Annabella's reputation: after her death, the world was still in love with Byron and Annabella had a reputation for being a horrible woman who couldn't appreciate what a wonderful man he was and who accused him of some unthinkable things. Seymour demonstrates convincingly that although Annabella could be stubborn and unforgiving, she was also generous, very intelligent, and wholly justified in leaving Byron (the relationship with Byron, full of incest, bouts of insanity, rape, and manipulation puts a lot of Gothic novels to shame).

The book tends to get bogged down in details... whole chapters are devoted to the development of friendships and business deals, and the events of those chapters are rarely placed in any context, so the reader is left to do their own analysis of why a particular friendship was worth including in such detail. This can make it tedious at times.

All in all, I'm glad I read this because it gives me a better understanding of who Ada was, and now I am aware of what a fascinating person Annabella was and how Ada would not have been so accomplished without her mother's encouragement. I do wish the book had been shorter and included more analysis instead of detailed chronologies of events. ( )

I'm fascinated by Byron, his wife, and daughter, but I couldn't get into this book. I found the author's writing style to be confusing. ( )

Sympathetic but reasonable portrait of a woman whose only claims to fame are marrying ill-advisedly and giving birth to "Lord Byron's daughter, his rare, extraordinary child," featured in the second half of the book, the brilliant, eccentric, quicksilver Ada. It's interesting, though, that the most compelling figure here remains Byron, present even when absent from the text. His shadow down the centuries is long.

Interesting perspective on Augusta, addressing questions that always seem to want answering. Also interesting on the posthumous trashing of Lady B's reputation following the calamitous publication of Stowe's gossipy Vindicated.

Not much new here, but engagingly recounted. ( )