Author’s Note

Once, long ago, I went to a lecture on classical art in a university library. I remember almost nothing about it – only one thing, in fact: being handed by the lecturer a small pottery triangle called a sherd – a fragment of some antiquated amphora. It had a pattern on it, I think, or else part of a picture. With the sherd was a slip of paper with printed instructions; one instruction was this: ‘Imagine out from your sherd’. I don’t think I fully understood, at the time, the invitation to take a single piece of a picture and try to imagine out from it, to construct in my mind the rest of the picture, the whole artefact – and not just what it looked like, but what it was used for, and who made it, and who used it – from just one tiny fragment. But although I forgot everything else about that day, there was something about that phrase, and its invitation to imagine out, that I never forgot, and, oddly, in the writing of this book, I have thought about that strange little line many times.

From letters and maps; from old books and new ones; from pictures and diagrams and newspapers and poems, I have tried to take what is known, or what has been written, about the girl who was born Ada Byron and died the Countess of Lovelace and imagine out from there. As far as I can tell, there should be some kind of middle plane between fiction and non-fiction where books like this one must sit; no matter how deep my research, or how wide my reading on topics such as the history of the allotment movement in England, or the educational principles of Pestalozzi, there would always be questions that could only be answered by imagining (which also feels to me quite appropriate, given Ada’s own imagination) what might have happened.

Sometimes, therefore, I have added scenes or details that might have taken place, but most probably didn’t – for example, there really was a Roman shield on display at the public library in Geneva, but we can’t be sure whether Ada and Annabella visited it; and although the Houses of Parliament did burn down in October 1834, there is no evidence that Ada watched it happen. It is doubtful, though not impossible, that Lord Byron ever visited Kirkby Mallory Hall, but I loved the idea of his favourite tree so much that I decided it ought to have a place in the story. Not much is known about Ada’s affair with her shorthand tutor – indeed, we can’t know with certainty whether the young man was in fact her shorthand tutor; we do know, however, that the shorthand tutor’s contract was terminated rather abruptly, which does suggest that something untoward went on. That tutor’s name was William Turner, but due to the high frequency of Williams in I, Ada already, and the fact that so little survives about this entire chapter of Ada’s life, I have rechristened him James Hopkins. Ada’s ‘Numbers’ poem that she shares with Miss Stamp before their Grand Tour is fictionalised.

Lastly, I do not think that Lady Byron would ever have written to her daughter a letter such as the one at the end of the book, in which she explains so much of what took place in her marriage; but if she had ever decided to write such a letter, the details it relates are, I hope, accurate ones. The other letters in I, Ada(with the exception of the note in the prayer-book sent by Augusta) are, likewise, products of my imagination.