The poet Lord Byron lived his life at such a melodramatic pitch that even had his verse not been populated by dashing, tormented and ultimately tragic heroes, it seems likely that the adjective "Byronic" would have entered the language. He drank from a cup fashioned out of a monk's skull, reportedly indulged in orgies, and was one of the first celebrities whose every move was reported and discussed by London society. Most important of all, for his glamorous reputation, if not for English literature, he died of a fever at the age of 36.
It's a legacy that would weigh heavily on any child but, as this new biography by Benjamin Woolley illustrates, it dominated the life of Ada Byron Lovelace, his only legitimate daughter and the subject of The Bride of Science. Not only was she a minor celebrity, but she also had to struggle with the very different qualities bequeathed her by her parents - her artistic, impetuous father and her methodic, moralistic mother.
As Woolley is at pains to point out, this made Ada very much a child of her time, as well as a child of Byron. In her, two very distinct schools of thought of early 19th-century life came together - the Romantics, who looked to the transcendent power of the imagination, and the scientists who looked to methodology and measurement to answer the same questions.
Ada made a not inconsiderable contribution to this new methodology herself - she worked with the likes of Charles Babbage, the inventor of calculating engines, and published a paper about his most ambitious invention, the Analytic Engine. This contained the first published example of what could be called a computer program. Indeed, since the 1980s, the US Department of Defence has called the standard programming language it adopted for its military systems, "Ada" in her honour.
Yet as The Bride of Science explores, Ada was always torn between her emotional and intellectual needs. Woolley attributes this almost entirely to the struggle for dominance between her parents, a struggle which continued even after Byron's death.
Annabella, Lady Byron was astonishingly ill-suited to her tempestuous poet husband and the marriage was short-lived and undistinguished. Their separation, however, took on a life of its own and split public opinion at the time. At its heart was Byron's alleged relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, a fact that was hidden from the public, but which contributed to the dissolution of the Byron marriage.
Annabella came to despise not only her husband, but anything that hinted at the romantic, the passionate and the intuitive - qualities she blamed for her ex-husband's dissolution. She gathered around her a gaggle of strictly moral guardians - known to Ada as "the Furies" - and set about eliminating all evidence of the sensual in her daughter. The famous portrait of Byron in Albanian dress was hidden behind a curtain and Ada was not to see a likeness of her father until she was 20 years old.
To a certain extent Annabella's policy worked - Ada developed a love of mathematics and science, and eventually married a stolid young man in the shape of William King, first Earl of Lovelace. In later life, she was to associate as a near equal with some of the great thinkers of her age such as Babbage and Andrew Crosse, a researcher into electrical power who was said to be the model for Mary Shelley's Dr Frankenstein.
But she was still her father's daughter, and her suppressed emotional side was to cause much soul-searching and not a few incidents abhorrent to her mother. There was the abortive elopement with an unnamed tutor at the age of 17, the extravagant gambling and the not entirely scientific fascination with the more bizarre tenets of mesmerism, phrenology and materialism.
It is hardly Woolley's fault that many of these intriguing and illuminating passions are infuriatingly under-documented - he can only suggest that Ada had an affair with one John Crosse because the 108 letters she sent him were rather suspiciously burnt. However, in the absence of facts, Woolley has a tendency to indulge in conjecture and to subject Ada to a kind of amateur psychoanalysis that does neither her, nor his book, any favours. Even when documentation is scarce, Ada Byron Lovelace is so fascinating and yet elusive a subject as to render untenable supposition unnecessary.