The Bride of Science

Benjamin Woolley

Pan Macmillan India

432 pages, Rs. 499

Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, was connected with some of the most influential and colourful characters of her age: Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin and Charles Babbage. Her work with Babbage led to her being credited with the invention of computer programming. Lovelace belonged to a fissured era, when romance split away from reason, instinct from intellect and art from science, heralding the dawn of the machine age. First published 15 years ago, The Bride of Science has been reissued this year to coincide with the bicentenary of Lovelace’s birth.