Introduction

New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Chiaverini illuminates the life of Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace—Lord Byron’s daughter and the world’s first computer programmer.
 
The only legitimate child of Lord Byron, the most brilliant, revered, and scandalous of the Romantic poets, Ada was destined for fame long before her birth. But her mathematician mother, estranged from Ada's infamous and destructively passionate father, is determined to save her only child from her perilous Byron heritage. Banishing fairy tales and make-believe from the nursery, Ada’s mother provides her daughter with a rigorous education grounded in mathematics and science. Any troubling spark of imagination—or worse yet, passion or poetry—is promptly extinguished. Or so her mother believes.
 
When Ada is introduced into London society as a highly eligible young heiress, she at last discovers the intellectual and social circles she has craved all her life. Little does she realize how her exciting new friendship with Charles Babbage—the brilliant, charming, and occasionally curmudgeonly inventor of an extraordinary machine, the Difference Engine—will define her destiny.

Enchantress of Numbers unveils the passions, dreams, and insatiable thirst for knowledge of a largely unheralded pioneer in computing—a young woman who stepped out of her father’s shadow to achieve her own laurels and champion the new technology that would shape the future.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of December 2017: In this biographical novel from author Jennifer Chiaverini, we journey into the life of Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, now largely considered to be the world’s first commuter programmer. Unknown to me, Ada was raised in the shadow of a famous father, as the only legitimate daughter of poet Lord Byron. We soon learn the eccentric Byron abandons his new family a month after Ada’s birth, never to see either his child or wife again. Ada’s mother becomes obsessed with purging all things creative and imaginative from Ada’s upbringing, in the hopes of saving her child from the same perceived mania that plagued her poet husband. With an ever-changing cast of tutors and governesses, and forbidden from most artistic outlets, Ada throws herself headfirst into academia and mathematics. Chiaverini expertly illuminates the adversities Ada faced in melding her analytical prowess with the creative thought she was told for so long to suppress. While Ada was largely unrecognized for her accomplishments while alive, this novel is a generous ode to one of history’s most extraordinary female trailblazers. --Sydney Dale

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