Mary Somerville, a Scottish astronomer, born in 1780, was also a mathematician, science writer, mother of four and lone female member of Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society. Mitchell, though, is only one of the extraordinary characters in this ambitious, challenging and somewhat category-defying book.īeginning with Johannes Kepler in 1617 and ending with Rachel Carson in the 1960s, Popova explores the lives and ideas of a group of exceptional people. Popova uses the astronomer’s letters, essays and other writing to bring her strength of being and drive for knowledge to life in lyrical prose. Despite its sorrows, her story is a pleasure to read. Tragically, Russell died at 36, and though Mitchell lived long, she mingled her life with that of no one in particular. “To mingle yet my life with thine, and e’en be one with thee.”) (“Take me, lady, spurn me not this blessing grant me,” Mitchell wrote. Mitchell, Popova writes, was probably in love with her friend Ida Russell, a famous beauty and Boston intellectual. If a gentleman’s with you, it’s talk talk talk.

There’s a deal to be learned in a midnight walk When you take it all alone. Mitchell also contributed poetry to her local literary club: She went on to become America’s first professional woman astronomer, the first woman to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, along with other firsts, a figure of immense power and genuine modesty. Sixteen years later Mitchell became the first person to sight a new comet passing through our solar system. Night after night, as Popova tells it, the young girl “would point her steadfast instrument at the nocturne and sweep the skies with quiet systematic passion, searching for a new celestial object against the backdrop of familiar bodies.” In 1831, at the age of 12, she was peering through a telescope to count out the seconds of an eclipse. In Maria Popova’s strange and lovely new book, “Figuring,” we learn about the precocious Maria Mitchell.

Popova figuring