FIGURING

By Maria Popova

In Maria Popova’s strange and lovely new book, “Figuring,” we learn about the precocious Maria Mitchell. In 1831, at the age of 12, she was peering through a telescope to count out the seconds of an eclipse. Night after night, as Popova tells it, the young girl “would point her steadfast instrument at the nocturne and sweep the skies with quiet systematic passion, searching for a new celestial object against the backdrop of familiar bodies.”

Sixteen years later Mitchell became the first person to sight a new comet passing through our solar system. She went on to become America’s first professional woman astronomer, the first woman to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, along with other firsts, a figure of immense power and genuine modesty.

Mitchell also contributed poetry to her local literary club:

There’s a deal to be learned in a midnight walk

When you take it all alone.

If a gentleman’s with you, it’s talk talk talk.

You’ve no eyes and mind of your own.

Mitchell, Popova writes, was probably in love with her friend Ida Russell, a famous beauty and Boston intellectual. (“Take me, lady, spurn me not; this blessing grant me,” Mitchell wrote. “To mingle yet my life with thine, and e’en be one with thee.”)

Tragically, Russell died at 36, and though Mitchell lived long, she mingled her life with that of no one in particular. Despite its sorrows, her story is a pleasure to read. Popova uses the astronomer’s letters, essays and other writing to bring her strength of being and drive for knowledge to life in lyrical prose. Mitchell, though, is only one of the extraordinary characters in this ambitious, challenging and somewhat category-defying book.