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The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel: The Lost Heroine of Astronomy
Caroline Herschel chronicled both her private life and her life in science in a series of diaries and autobiographies which she kept for family members. She also kept notebooks and observation notes. Yet in 1788, the year of her brother’s marriage, all diaries and journals ceased. As a result, we have almost no record of the decade in which, ironically, she made her most influential mark on science, in which she discovered eight comets and became the first woman to have a paper read at the Royal Society. She destroyed all of her notebooks and diaries from this time, and her notes only resume in 1797, leaving us to piece together these lost 10 years of one of the most influential women of science. Here, for the first time, physicist Emily Winterburn looks deep into Caroline’s life and wonders why, in the year following the marriage of her brother and constant companion, Caroline wanted no record of her life to remain. Was she consumed with grief and jealousy? By piecing together—from letters, reminiscences, and sometimes museum objects—a detailed account of that time, we get to see a new side to Caroline and the story of 10 extraordinary years.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published April 1, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 15, 2025
The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel covers the ten "lost years" of Caroline Hershel's life: 1788 through 1797. In 1788, her brother (Uranus discoverer William Herschel) got married and Caroline discovered her second comet. Over the next decade, Caroline would discover additional comets (4 according to Winterburn; 6 according to other sources—priority of the discovery was sometimes in question due to frequency of the comet and timeliness of communications). She also became an Aunt (to the scientist John Herschel), began a robust index of England's primary navigational star chart, made friends with other astronomy nerds, hung out with her brothers, and overall established herself as a female contributor to the world of astronomical discovery in the 1780s, 90s, and 1800s.
And at some point after 1797, she destroyed all her diaries for this period. The general hypothesis is that she said some mean things about William's wife, Mary, and regretted these due to their eventual more positive relationship and/or because of the strength of her relationship with her nephew, John.
Winterburn posits that perhaps it was less about the rude things she may have said about Mary; that instead, Caroline may have inadvertently exposed her own bald ambitions too clearly for her to be completely comfortable with. Throughout Caroline's life, she put forth her discoveries and contributions as "minor" things that occurred because she was helping her brother William, or that her work was "merely helpful" at, for example, William's behest (vs. something entirely done by her). And that timid approach to inserting herself into the scientific world of the day seems to have been the cheat code to get her in the back door, allowing her to be given credit (of course only after it was validated by An Actual Man) but also establishing her (metaphorical) presence as an ally and not an invading presence (see Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne aka "Mad Madge").
Overall, Winterburn's narrative is interesting and engaging. The text itself could use a more polished edit (both content and format): there's a LOT of repetitious phrasing and context and explanation that sometimes comes across as unintentionally sloppy or condescending. There are also a few places where the kerning seems to remove the spaces after periods or other punctuation.
Still an entertaining, informational read.
And at some point after 1797, she destroyed all her diaries for this period. The general hypothesis is that she said some mean things about William's wife, Mary, and regretted these due to their eventual more positive relationship and/or because of the strength of her relationship with her nephew, John.
Winterburn posits that perhaps it was less about the rude things she may have said about Mary; that instead, Caroline may have inadvertently exposed her own bald ambitions too clearly for her to be completely comfortable with. Throughout Caroline's life, she put forth her discoveries and contributions as "minor" things that occurred because she was helping her brother William, or that her work was "merely helpful" at, for example, William's behest (vs. something entirely done by her). And that timid approach to inserting herself into the scientific world of the day seems to have been the cheat code to get her in the back door, allowing her to be given credit (of course only after it was validated by An Actual Man) but also establishing her (metaphorical) presence as an ally and not an invading presence (see Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne aka "Mad Madge").
Overall, Winterburn's narrative is interesting and engaging. The text itself could use a more polished edit (both content and format): there's a LOT of repetitious phrasing and context and explanation that sometimes comes across as unintentionally sloppy or condescending. There are also a few places where the kerning seems to remove the spaces after periods or other punctuation.
Still an entertaining, informational read.
February 8, 2020
Cosa ci potrebbe essere da raccontare, su una donna che è stata tutta casa e osservatorio? In effetti, nella vita di Caroline Herschel non c'è stato molto altro, salvo un'infanzia da Cenerentola e un ruolo da zia.
Ma quello che Caroline Herschel ha fatto nell'astronomia ha cambiato in modo determinante il modo con cui si guarda alle donne nella scienza e, più in generale, al modo con cui tutti guardiamo al cielo (questo libro mi è stato utilissimo per preparare la puntata di Wikiradio, Rai Radio Tre, dedicata a Caroline Hesrchel, in onda il 17 marzo 2020, in occasione della ricorrenza della sua nascita).
Ma quello che Caroline Herschel ha fatto nell'astronomia ha cambiato in modo determinante il modo con cui si guarda alle donne nella scienza e, più in generale, al modo con cui tutti guardiamo al cielo (questo libro mi è stato utilissimo per preparare la puntata di Wikiradio, Rai Radio Tre, dedicata a Caroline Hesrchel, in onda il 17 marzo 2020, in occasione della ricorrenza della sua nascita).
November 20, 2023
I've read a bit about Caroline Herschel, often in the context of "here are women who did important things in science who don't get enough recognition." She was one of those women who helped a man get lots of science done - in her case, her brother William: she was his assistant for much of his observing life, writing down his observations and helping with his frankly unwieldy telescopes, as well as keeping house for him for many years until he married - and then his wife had money so they had more servants. All of those things are immensely important and often get overlooked; no one is able to do science on the scale of William Herschel, or Robert Boyle, or Charles Darwin, without an immense amount of assistance: usually either female, lower class, or both. Hence why that assistance is often overlooked, because the European narrative in particular is much happier with the 'great man' theory.
To leave Caroline's story at that, though, is to do her an immense disservice. She was an astronomer in her own right, discovering eight comets (two of which she wasn't the official discoverer, because someone else got there first, but she didn't know about that when she found them). She also contributed observations to William's immense catalogue of the 'nebulous' stars. In the late 1700s, most people assumed that that 'cloudy' or nebulous patches in the sky were simply stars that contemporary telescopes couldn't resolve. William used the largest telescopes of the time to realise that actually, some of those areas actually couldn't be resolved - they really did look cloudy - and suggested that maybe some of those areas were where stars were born. (He also discovered Uranus - the first planet to have been discovered by a human, rather than seen naked-eye, which is what shot him to fame.) Caroline personally observed and described some of the Herschel catalogue.
And then there's the other scientific tasks she undertook, which might be easy to skim over because they don't seem that sexy. She worked for years on a massive index and catalogue of stars, using the main one available in English: double checking for errors, making it systematic, and so on. Not glamorous, requiring hours of probably boring labour, required a great deal of knowledge - what an amazing contribution to astronomy.
Anyway, the biography: is not entirely what I was expecting! It focuses largely on a decade in the middle of Caroline's life, her most scientifically productive - and a decade for which she destroyed her dairy entires and never discussed in either of the two memoirs she produced later in life. There's a lot of speculation for why this might be; most people conclude that it's because she wrote some bitchy stuff about her new sister-in-law and that this didn't fit her self-image as meek, self-effacing, and doing everything for family. It's a fascinating question and one that will almost certainly never be resolved. So Winterburn has used letters, information from journals, and references in other places to reconstruct those lost years, and in doing so to highlight just how phenomenal Caroline was as a scientist. While she wasn't the first women to be paid to do science - lots of other women were doing 'science', it just wasn't usually called that - she was the first English woman to have a royal pension for doing science, and that's very damn impressive.
There are oddly repetitive bits throughout the book, where Winterburn repeats ideas or phrases that have just been laid out a paragraph or two earlier; and the book can't solely concentrate on the one decade, because the reader needs greater context for Caroline's life - so it's not without flaws. There's also a frankly odd emphasis on the events of the French Revolution; while it certainly had a huge impact on some of the people Caroline and her brother corresponded with, it didn't actually seem to have a direct impact of Caroline, living in England - she wasn't obviously a supporter of either Burke or Paine (anti or pro the revolution), so I was confused by how many ink was spent discussing those foreign events. Nevertheless, overall I really enjoyed this, and am immensely pleased to know more about Caroline. To the point where I'm considering the so-called Herschel 400 as an observing list.
To leave Caroline's story at that, though, is to do her an immense disservice. She was an astronomer in her own right, discovering eight comets (two of which she wasn't the official discoverer, because someone else got there first, but she didn't know about that when she found them). She also contributed observations to William's immense catalogue of the 'nebulous' stars. In the late 1700s, most people assumed that that 'cloudy' or nebulous patches in the sky were simply stars that contemporary telescopes couldn't resolve. William used the largest telescopes of the time to realise that actually, some of those areas actually couldn't be resolved - they really did look cloudy - and suggested that maybe some of those areas were where stars were born. (He also discovered Uranus - the first planet to have been discovered by a human, rather than seen naked-eye, which is what shot him to fame.) Caroline personally observed and described some of the Herschel catalogue.
And then there's the other scientific tasks she undertook, which might be easy to skim over because they don't seem that sexy. She worked for years on a massive index and catalogue of stars, using the main one available in English: double checking for errors, making it systematic, and so on. Not glamorous, requiring hours of probably boring labour, required a great deal of knowledge - what an amazing contribution to astronomy.
Anyway, the biography: is not entirely what I was expecting! It focuses largely on a decade in the middle of Caroline's life, her most scientifically productive - and a decade for which she destroyed her dairy entires and never discussed in either of the two memoirs she produced later in life. There's a lot of speculation for why this might be; most people conclude that it's because she wrote some bitchy stuff about her new sister-in-law and that this didn't fit her self-image as meek, self-effacing, and doing everything for family. It's a fascinating question and one that will almost certainly never be resolved. So Winterburn has used letters, information from journals, and references in other places to reconstruct those lost years, and in doing so to highlight just how phenomenal Caroline was as a scientist. While she wasn't the first women to be paid to do science - lots of other women were doing 'science', it just wasn't usually called that - she was the first English woman to have a royal pension for doing science, and that's very damn impressive.
There are oddly repetitive bits throughout the book, where Winterburn repeats ideas or phrases that have just been laid out a paragraph or two earlier; and the book can't solely concentrate on the one decade, because the reader needs greater context for Caroline's life - so it's not without flaws. There's also a frankly odd emphasis on the events of the French Revolution; while it certainly had a huge impact on some of the people Caroline and her brother corresponded with, it didn't actually seem to have a direct impact of Caroline, living in England - she wasn't obviously a supporter of either Burke or Paine (anti or pro the revolution), so I was confused by how many ink was spent discussing those foreign events. Nevertheless, overall I really enjoyed this, and am immensely pleased to know more about Caroline. To the point where I'm considering the so-called Herschel 400 as an observing list.
June 28, 2018
Thankfully, with the attention now given to the history of women in the sciences, the subtitle of Emily Winterburn's book 'the lost heroine of astronomy' is not really accurate. Admittedly, thanks to the relative coverage given to less substantial contributors to science such as Ada Lovelace, some might underestimate Caroline Herschel's contribution. However, I've read several books on Herschel's work now, notably Claire Brock's The Comet Sweeper and Michael Hoskin's book on both William and Caroline, Discoverers of the Universe.
What Winterburn brings impressively is a feel for Caroline the person - although Winterburn is a historian of science, this is more a biography of the active part of a scientist's life rather than a scientific biography. Having read the story often from William Herschel's viewpoint, there's a feeling of watching one of those clever movies where you see the same situation from two individual's very different viewpoints. Here it is the incredibly productive Caroline's view of the world. As Winterburn makes clear, Caroline was not the first woman to be involved in science, nor even the first to get recognition as such by the scientific authorities - but she was the first to become visible in this way in the UK and her contribution, both in 'comet sweeping' and totally restructuring the catalogue of nebulae (as well as increasing its content significantly) was highly significant.
There's always a danger with a biography, especially of a 'forgotten figure' in history, that the account becomes worthy and dull. This isn't at all the case here. Winterburn has apparently been able to access a large quantity of primary material, and this is largely a very readable account. It's topped and tailed by relatively brief summaries of Caroline's life before and after her astronomical work, but the vast majority focuses on around 10 years when she was actively using telescopes, finding comets and nebulae and amassing an impressive catalogue.
Caroline comes across as someone who is far more interested in family and work than a social life. For a poor background, she was thrust with her brother into a middle class world on the fringes of Royal patronage and clearly wasn't always comfortable with the social requirements this brought. However, Winterburn portrays well Caroline's very slow acceptance of her own worth and gives plenty of context from the gradual improvement in women's independence to the influence the French Revolution was having on English life. What is very clear is that Caroline was far more than her brother's helper - though there is no doubt that he would not have achieved as much as he did without her.
My only issue with the book is that it does seem under-edited. All books contain the odd error, but there seemed slightly more than usual. For example, we are told that Venus, the brightest thing in the night sky after the Moon, has a lower apparent magnitude than the brighter stars and there's a reference to the University of Aberdeen, which didn't exist in the eighteenth century. The bigger aspect of the editing issue as a reader, though, was repetition. In the second half of the book particularly, some points are made repeatedly from chapter to chapter, sometimes with similar wording. In the worst instance, the repetition is in the same few lines:
‘He then set about promoting this eclipse as a public astronomical spectacle, using maps to show where to stand for the best view… to encourage people to go out and view this… he had maps printed showing exactly where to go to view it. ‘
This did make me pull back from what otherwise would have been a five star rating, but it's still a very useful and approachable insight into Caroline's work and its social and political context.
What Winterburn brings impressively is a feel for Caroline the person - although Winterburn is a historian of science, this is more a biography of the active part of a scientist's life rather than a scientific biography. Having read the story often from William Herschel's viewpoint, there's a feeling of watching one of those clever movies where you see the same situation from two individual's very different viewpoints. Here it is the incredibly productive Caroline's view of the world. As Winterburn makes clear, Caroline was not the first woman to be involved in science, nor even the first to get recognition as such by the scientific authorities - but she was the first to become visible in this way in the UK and her contribution, both in 'comet sweeping' and totally restructuring the catalogue of nebulae (as well as increasing its content significantly) was highly significant.
There's always a danger with a biography, especially of a 'forgotten figure' in history, that the account becomes worthy and dull. This isn't at all the case here. Winterburn has apparently been able to access a large quantity of primary material, and this is largely a very readable account. It's topped and tailed by relatively brief summaries of Caroline's life before and after her astronomical work, but the vast majority focuses on around 10 years when she was actively using telescopes, finding comets and nebulae and amassing an impressive catalogue.
Caroline comes across as someone who is far more interested in family and work than a social life. For a poor background, she was thrust with her brother into a middle class world on the fringes of Royal patronage and clearly wasn't always comfortable with the social requirements this brought. However, Winterburn portrays well Caroline's very slow acceptance of her own worth and gives plenty of context from the gradual improvement in women's independence to the influence the French Revolution was having on English life. What is very clear is that Caroline was far more than her brother's helper - though there is no doubt that he would not have achieved as much as he did without her.
My only issue with the book is that it does seem under-edited. All books contain the odd error, but there seemed slightly more than usual. For example, we are told that Venus, the brightest thing in the night sky after the Moon, has a lower apparent magnitude than the brighter stars and there's a reference to the University of Aberdeen, which didn't exist in the eighteenth century. The bigger aspect of the editing issue as a reader, though, was repetition. In the second half of the book particularly, some points are made repeatedly from chapter to chapter, sometimes with similar wording. In the worst instance, the repetition is in the same few lines:
‘He then set about promoting this eclipse as a public astronomical spectacle, using maps to show where to stand for the best view… to encourage people to go out and view this… he had maps printed showing exactly where to go to view it. ‘
This did make me pull back from what otherwise would have been a five star rating, but it's still a very useful and approachable insight into Caroline's work and its social and political context.
August 31, 2025
This is an interesting look at the life of a woman who might not be known by most, but was instrumental in helping her brother William Herschel in his work as well as being an accomplished comet hunter in her own right, discovering 6 comets during her life. However, following the marriage of her brother to a woman she didn't approve of, her life is a mystery as she destroyed her diaries of the next ten years. The author has attempted to determine what happened during those missing years by looking through still existing letters and journal articles and the result is useful in showing how Caroline Herschel managed to overcome her shyness and demure attitudes and claimed a place in the history of astronomy.
It is so important to give equal weight to the work and expertise of women in science and this book does that for this amazing woman. Unfortunately, for me there were too many repetitions of incidents in Caroline's life and I felt the book could have been shorter if edited properly, hence the three-star review.
It is so important to give equal weight to the work and expertise of women in science and this book does that for this amazing woman. Unfortunately, for me there were too many repetitions of incidents in Caroline's life and I felt the book could have been shorter if edited properly, hence the three-star review.
March 11, 2019
A marvelous biography. Really well documented and written, is one of the best biographies I have ever read.
All the figures in the book are refered to where to find them or where were they published, so the reader can try to access the originals.
The book is centered in the 10 most "astronomically productive" years of Caroline Herschel. These are, as well, the 10 years she destroyed from her diaries. So the book is based in other documents we have left from that time.
I really liked that the book explains her personality and and how she thought, because that are the causes of her manner of doing things.
I trully recomend it because of the good documentation of the book and because of the way of writting of the author, who isn't expressing any opinion, but just presenting facts. Thankfully the author isn't trying to guess the thoughts of Caroline because, that would be a way to conditionate the readers mind about Caroline.
All the figures in the book are refered to where to find them or where were they published, so the reader can try to access the originals.
The book is centered in the 10 most "astronomically productive" years of Caroline Herschel. These are, as well, the 10 years she destroyed from her diaries. So the book is based in other documents we have left from that time.
I really liked that the book explains her personality and and how she thought, because that are the causes of her manner of doing things.
I trully recomend it because of the good documentation of the book and because of the way of writting of the author, who isn't expressing any opinion, but just presenting facts. Thankfully the author isn't trying to guess the thoughts of Caroline because, that would be a way to conditionate the readers mind about Caroline.
January 17, 2022
A thorough biography of Caroline Herschel's most productive years as an astronomer. Winterburn uncovers through letters and historical papers some of the story that was lost when Herschel destroyed her own journals from these critical years in her career. I am grateful for historians like Winterburn who put together the pieces of the puzzle to understand as best we can the lives of women who found ways to pursue vocations when their very calling was disallowed by the scientific community. Caroline Herschel did not bend to those social conventions. She cleverly found a way to exist in her field in spite of the rules that forbid her entrance. Her work revolutionized astronomy.
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April 28, 2020Povero Scaglione lo scoppio dell'epidemia della SARS da coronavirus 2020 non gli ha permesso di essere trasmesso il suo Wikiradio del 17-03-2020, forse verrà trasmesso nel 17-03-2021.
April 20, 2024
A fascinating and engaging book which I thoroughly enjoyed reading.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews