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6 - Memory and Mary Somerville: In the Public Eye and Historical Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2010

Kathryn A. Neeley
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Summary

Mrs. Somerville's reputation is likely to be permanent, but it is possible that this unaffected record of a beautiful and consistent life may be of more benefit to society than even the valuable works to which she is indebted for her fame.

–Review of Personal Recollections, The Spectator, January 31, 1874

I began this project with the nave assumption that Mary Somerville was a forgotten woman. My reasons for thinking she was forgotten were straightforward: I had read dozens of comprehensive histories of science, and I had never seen her treated as anything more than a footnote, and rarely even as a footnote. As I examined in detail how she had been treated by the history of science, I realized that something much more interesting than forgetting was going on. She was not forgotten. She just could not be integrated into the patterns of traditional history of science. The eminence she had achieved in her own time was overshadowed by the fact that there was no major discovery to which her name could be attached and by the conceptual filters that either discounted women's achievements or failed altogether to recognize them.

The “Forgetting” of Mary Somerville

Of all the aspects of Mary Somerville's life and career, her fall into relative obscurity – what I will call here her “forgetting” – is one of the most interesting. By “forgetting” I mean not the literal loss of knowledge of her existence but rather her absence from standard histories of science. During her lifetime, she had been an integral part of the living scientific community, but she was an outsider to history.

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Mary Somerville
Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind
, pp. 199 - 237
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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