I began this project with the nave assumption that Mary Somerville was a forgotten woman. My reasons for thinking she was forgotten were straightforward: I had read dozens of comprehensive histories of science, and I had never seen her treated as anything more than a footnote, and rarely even as a footnote. As I examined in detail how she had been treated by the history of science, I realized that something much more interesting than forgetting was going on. She was not forgotten. She just could not be integrated into the patterns of traditional history of science. The eminence she had achieved in her own time was overshadowed by the fact that there was no major discovery to which her name could be attached and by the conceptual filters that either discounted women's achievements or failed altogether to recognize them.

The “Forgetting” of Mary Somerville

Of all the aspects of Mary Somerville's life and career, her fall into relative obscurity – what I will call here her “forgetting” – is one of the most interesting. By “forgetting” I mean not the literal loss of knowledge of her existence but rather her absence from standard histories of science. During her lifetime, she had been an integral part of the living scientific community, but she was an outsider to history.