The Stargazer's Sister

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Fortunately for the world, brother and sister William and Caroline Herschel left remarkable and detailed records of their lives in the form of letters, lists, catalogs, journals, musings, “day books,” and scientific papers. The habit of such recordkeeping is not unusual, either for the Herschels’ time or in general among people who believe their work holds implications for history, and indeed, the Herschels’, especially William’s, investigations into astronomy were proven to be of great significance to the world’s understanding of the universe, both then and now. History is often recorded in words as well as deeds.

Extraordinary people individually and together, William and Caroline — divided by the twelve years between them and by their different genders but united in so many other ways, including their great affection for each other — were active correspondents and chroniclers of their separate and combined scientific endeavors and achievements, as well as the more prosaic details of their daily domestic experience. A scholar in search of the story of their lives will find no shortage of material, written both by the Herschels themselves and, as the years progressed, by others — scientists and biographers — who understood the significance and scale of their contributions to astronomy, and who worked with diligence and skill to produce narratives that reflect the fullness of the lives of these two singularly fascinating people and their place in scientific history.

I am grateful first for William’s and Caroline’s shared habit of letter writing and of keeping records of their experience, and especially for Caroline’s effort later in her life to fashion a narrative from the deep and rich trove of material left by her brother and contained in her own notebooks. Historians and novelists are fortunate when the subjects of their interest leave behind richly furnished rooms so easily explored and from which a story can be understood.

So it is first to William and Caroline themselves that I owe the greatest debt, not only for the inspiration of the remarkable story of their relationship, one perhaps unparalleled in scientific history, but also for their generosity toward those who would come after them and wish to understand what it had been like for them to work side by side, as William once said, in the “laboratories of the universe.”

A historian seeking to understand the Herschels’ lives would approach their story very differently than I have done, though we might depend on many of the same sources for information. Historical novels hove to varying degrees of factual “truth” about their particular subject or place or time, according to the writers and their concerns. It is Caroline’s life in which I have been chiefly interested for the years of my work on this novel. In telling her story in The Stargazer’s Sister, I have made several deviations — some minor, some dramatic — from the historical record, sometimes for purposes of narrative design and sometimes out of an impulse to shape the material for purposes other than historical accuracy. The character of Dr. Silva and his relationship with Caroline is entirely invented, for instance, and various chronologies and details of the Herschel family or William’s scientific work or his and Caroline’s movements from house to house have been collapsed or altered or compressed. Stanley is an entirely invented character, for instance, as is Sir Henry Spencer, though William in fact had many friends among the British aristocracy.

William Herschel and Mary Pitt had a son, Sir John Herschel, who went on to become an astronomer of great importance in his own right, but the fact of his existence has been omitted from this story. William and Caroline’s brothers played a role in their astronomical endeavors, though to a lesser degree than Caroline or William himself, obviously, but they appear only as minor characters in this novel.

In some cases I have used Caroline’s or William’s words — written or spoken — exactly as they are reported by various sources; in some cases I have changed those words slightly, and for much of the novel, of course, the dialogue is entirely invented. In any case, when I used their actual words I tried to do so in a way that represented circumstances and motivations accurately.

The dates of some historical events have been altered for chronological consistency or compression within the novel (such as the date of the Battle of Hastenbeck, for instance). I likewise made changes to the scene in which the Herschel family views a partial solar eclipse in a tub of water in their courtyard in Hanover. This event occurred, in fact, in 1764, later than I have presented it in the novel, and while in the novel William explains the phenomenon for his family, he was not actually present for it. Likewise, William’s discovery of the sixth and seventh moons of Saturn were separated by nearly a month, but in the novel they occur on the same night.

The epigraph to Penelope Fitzgerald’s extraordinary historical novel The Blue Flower comes from the poet known as Novalis, who is the novel’s protagonist: “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.” Writing on The Blue Flower (and other novels) in The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood argues that it is the specific and extraordinary feat of fiction to “rescue those private moments that history would never have been able to record…when we read historical fiction the characters take on lives of their own, and begin to detach themselves in our minds from the actuality of the historical record. When characters in historical novels die, they die as fictional characters, not as historical personages.” In The Stargazer’s Sister, I have sought to illuminate those “private moments” unrecorded by history. Yet for all the changes — inventions and omissions — to the historical record of William’s and Caroline’s lives, I wanted to capture the truth of what has felt to me from the first most intriguing and most moving about Caroline’s life: that she clearly loved her brother, that she admired him and served him and his endeavors with unquestionable loyalty and intelligence…and that her devotion was not without complexity and perhaps sometimes cost for her. Her life ran alongside his, and their parallel tracks were rarely divided by distance of any significance in terms of time or space, but their lives were not the same life, and for all their closeness, their experiences occurred in very different universes.

In September 1798, Caroline wrote to Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, England’s royal astronomer from 1765 to 1811, from her and William’s home in Slough, England. She wished, she said, to thank Dr. Maskelyne for his support in seeing printed her index to John Flamsteed’s famous star catalog, at the time among the most complete atlases of the night sky since Tycho Brahe’s catalog of the 1500s. The letter contains a paragraph that shows exactly the degree to which Caroline understood that her and her brother’s lives, for all their closeness, were both regarded and influenced and shaped by the conventions of the times and by prevailing notions about men and women. Caroline was born in 1750; if she had been born one hundred or two hundred years later, of course, her life would have been very different indeed.

“Your having thought it worthy of the press has flattered my vanity not a little,” she wrote to Maskelyne about his interest in her index. “You see, sir, I do own myself to be vain, because I would not wish to be singular; and was there ever a woman without vanity? Or a man either? Only with this difference, that among gentlemen the commodity is generally styled ambition.”

This careful bit of wit contains an important clue to Caroline’s understanding of the world’s perception of her role in her brother’s life.

—

THOSE WHO WISH TO READ about the Herschels will find ample material, and I am much indebted to the following works for the light they helped shed on the significance of William’s and Caroline’s contributions to astronomy and overall to the world in which they lived and worked.

Two volumes in particular provided helpful and substantive records of the Herschels’ lives.

The Herschel Chronicle: The Life-Story of William Herschel and His Sister Caroline Herschel, edited by William’s granddaughter Constance A. Lubbock (Cambridge University Press, 1933), uses letters, Caroline’s journals, and various selections from among William’s writings, including his scientific papers “On the Construction of the Heavens” and “On Nebulous Stars.”

Caroline’s papers are contained under the title Memoir and Correspondence of Caroline Herschel, compiled by Mary Cornwallis, the wife of John Herschel, William’s only son. As she writes in her introduction to the volume, “Great men and great causes have always some helper of whom the outside world knows but little. There always is, and always has been, some human being in whose life their roots have been nourished. Sometimes these helpers have been men, sometimes they have been women, who have given themselves to help and to strengthen those called upon to be leaders and workers, inspiring them with courage, keeping faith in their own idea alive, in days of darkness…These helpers and sustainers, men or women, have all the same quality in common — absolute devotion and unwavering faith in the individual or in the cause. Seeking nothing for themselves, thinking nothing of themselves, they have all an intense power of sympathy, a noble love of giving themselves for the service of others, which enables them to transfuse the force of their own personality into the object to which they dedicate their powers.

“Of this noble company of unknown helpers Caroline Herschel was one.”

Mary Cornwallis’s sensitive and perceptive reading of Caroline’s writing and correspondence creates a nuanced portrait of Caroline that was immensely helpful to me.

I am indebted as well to the work of many others who have written about the Herschels, chiefly Michael Hoskin, perhaps the foremost scholar of the Herschels’ lives, who has written voluminously about both William and Caroline. I relied heavily on his work Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline Herschel, published in 2011 by Princeton University Press. It is my hope that should he ever read this novel, he would appreciate the story’s deviations from the historical record and see in my changes to that record an altered but not unrecognizable truth.

Also invaluable to me were The Georgian Star: How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos by Michael D. Lemonick. This book, released in 2004, is among the titles in the Great Discoveries series published by W. W. Norton & Company. In addition, The Comet Sweeper: Caroline Herschel’s Astronomical Ambition by Claire Brock, published by Icon Books in 2007, offered further insights into Caroline’s life. Richard Holmes’s marvelous The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science was hugely helpful in its portraits of several figures from the scientific revolution of the later part of the eighteenth century. There are likely few better sources than Holmes’s brilliant book for capturing the excitement of that period, and the figures of genius, wit, and bravery who characterized that era.

Another volume vastly useful to me, especially for an understanding of Caroline’s early years, was Flesh and Spirit: Private Life in Early Modern Germany by Steven Ozment.

Of additional assistance were several small books — by Patrick Moore, Frank Brown, Michael Hoskin, and Brian Warner — prepared for The William Herschel Society, which maintains The William Herschel Museum in Bath.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the indefatigable Dr. Tom Michalik, retired Professor of Physics from Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, for his vast knowledge and experience as an astronomer and for his skillful, painstaking, enthusiastic, and patient review of the manuscript and his advice about many scientific aspects of the novel. Any errors of that sort remaining are mine alone. He did his best with me.

Edd Jennings — man of many talents — was also an attentive and kind and informed reader, and his letters to me about the manuscript were thoughtful and full of rich detail.

Many graduate students at the University of Virginia were generous about sharing their knowledge with me over the years at the university’s McCormick Observatory.

A trip to Bath, England, and the surprisingly modest Herschel house and museum there helped me envision more clearly the years Caroline and William spent on New King Street in Bath.

Jennifer Brice — gifted writer, sympathetic reader, dear friend — heroically read multiple drafts of the novel. I am deeply grateful to her for the comfort and joy of her companionship, and for her continued faith, interest, and patience over the decade of my work on the story, as well as her endless store of good advice and her empathetic understanding of Caroline’s life.

My daughter Molly McCully Brown was a faithful — and attentive and sensitive — reader of various revisions, and her suggestions were enormously helpful. Her deft touch informs many important scenes in the novel.

To my brilliant editor, Deb Garrison, and my wise, faithful agent, Lisa Bankoff: my eternal gratitude.

To Pantheon and all its employees: I am honored to have a seat at the table. Thank you for helping to bring Caroline into the world in this way.

To my husband, John Gregory Brown, first and last and best reader, who over the many years of my work on the novel told me no, no, no, no, no, and then, at last, yes, I dedicate this book, as I have all the others, with my enduring gratitude, admiration, and love.