...tonight I learned that there were other women before me. So very, very many of them. They were here all along: spotting comets, naming stars, pointing telescopes at the sky alongside their fathers and brothers and sons. And still the men they worked with scorned them. [loc. 3655]
Set in 1816, this is the love story of two women: Lucy Muchelny, whose astronomical work has been thwarted by the death of her father (and whose heart has been broken by the marriage of her lover Pris), and Catherine, Countess of Moth, a widow who writes to Lucy to request recommendations for someone to translate a treatise on celestial mechanics. Lucy, keen to escape the confines and expectations of her home and her brother's plans for her, offers her services as translator, and finds a like-minded spirit in Catherine, who travelled the globe with her emotionally-abusive husband before his death.
Catherine is a keen embroiderer, producing vivid textile art inspired by her travels, and the plants and animals she encountered: but she has to learn to see her art as art, rather than as a feminine pursuit. And Lucy, who did the majority of her father's calculations as his health declined, finds herself enthralled by the 'crystalline clarity' of Oleron's work -- and keen to make it more accessible to the general reader, for example Catherine ...
The romance encounters the usual stumbling blocks -- poor communication, assumptions on both parts, social differences -- plus, of course, the potential scandal of a same-sex relationship. But Catherine, the more inexperienced of the two when it comes to love between women, begins to realise that such relationships can exist in plain sight, without fear of exposure.
I enjoyed this a lot: the contrast between scientific Lucy and artistic Catherine, the ways in which they both gained confidence from the other's company, the vignettes of Regency life. Waite focusses on lives more ordinary than those of the aristocracy, who people Heyer's novels and a thousand more inspired by Heyer and Austen. I was also pleased to find both plot and sub-plot concerned with female independence and women's competences.
There have been criticisms that astronomer Caroline Herschel is absent from this novel, and of the suggestion that Black students weren't admitted to university. I didn't find the first to be true (names have been changed, but the president of the 'Polite Science Society' is a Mr Hawley, and "Half the comets discovered in the last century were first observed by Mr. Hawley’s sister" [loc. 3646]). The second required a little research: Cambridge University admitted at least one Black student in the 18th century, but the first Black student at Oxford -- which is the university being discussed here -- didn't matriculate until 1873. I don't know whether the absence of Black students was, as presented in the novel, a matter of policy.
Arguing only because the Herschel criticism nearly stopped me from reading the novel, and I'd like to reassure others.
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