Daughter
As Ada grew, Lady Byron feared she might inherit Byron's behaviors and dark moods. She schooled Ada in science and mathematics and discouraged literary study. Though her effort was great, it eventually seemed in vain. Ada Lovelace embodied many of her father's rebellious qualities. She is also considered to have been the world's first computer programmer, having written the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine--Charles Babbage's analytical engine.
She married at nineteen years of age, had three children, and amassed considerable gambling debts before dying from cancer on November 27, 1852. Lady Byron attended her daughter's deathbed, where she refused Ada opiates on the grounds that they would cloud her mind too much for repentance. Ada Lovelace was thirty-six years old when she died (the same age as Lord Byron when he died).
Read more about this topic: Anne Isabella Byron, Baroness Byron
Famous quotes containing the word daughter:
“Having children can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to accept, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too—unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00 A.M. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child’s trouble.”
—Anna Quindlen (20th century)
“Oh my daughter,
My sweetheart, daughter of my late employer, princess,
May you not be long on the way!”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Science! true daughter of old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee—or how deem thee wise
Who woulds’t not leave him in his wandering,”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)