Mary Somerville taught herself mathematics from a fashion magazine’s puzzle page and rose to translate Laplace and have Somerville College named for her. Her Personal Recollections, finished in her ninety-second year, look back with wry candour on a Scottish girlhood of enforced needlework, stolen Euclid by candlelight, and the long ascent to the centre of European science.
The self-portrait is modest; the achievement it records was revolutionary. Download the free EPUB and hear the ‘Queen of Nineteenth-Century Science’ tell her own improbable story.