Other People’s Truths? Scientific Subjects in the Personal Recollections, From Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville

Abstract

In her eighty-ninth year and as what turned out to be her final piece of writing, Mary Somerville set out to produce an account of her life. After her mother’s death in 1872, Martha Somerville was persuaded to publish the resulting text, despite some hesitation on her part, knowing that her mother had been ‘strongly averse to gossip, and to revelations of private life’ (1873: 1–6). Martha Somerville can hardly be blamed for sharing what is a commonly held view about autobiography, that its impetus comes from giving readers insight into private lives, but the process of writing and publication of Mary Somerville’s Recollections sets up some significant tensions around that idea. For, what is of primary interest about the Recollections, is the public ‘revelations’. This is the story of a girl growing up in late eighteenth-century Britain, getting access to education and eventually a reputation as a leading scientist, after having been, according to her own account, practically illiterate until the age of nine. This is the story of an individual, but it is also the story of a professional community: the life of a scientist, and the life of science; the story of the human subject, and of an epistemological one.