The best thing in its line since Dava Sobel’s Longitude. Bergland tells a great, if too little known, story of an intellectual woman in nineteenth-century New England. And it is beautifully told: I simply could not put it down. Anyone who cares about women’s education in America should read this compelling and indispensable book. —Robert D. Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
“Renée Bergland recounts the story of Maria Mitchell’s life and work in glorious and careful detail. One feels and hears the sounds of Mitchell’s native Nantucket and her adopted Vassar, and comes to understand how one of the ‘gentler sex’ advanced astronomy in her day.”—Londa Schiebinger, author of Has Feminism Changed Science?
INTRODUCTION
Venus in the Sunshine
CHAPTER 1
Urania’s Island
CHAPTER 2
Nantucket Athena
CHAPTER 3
The Sexes of Science
CHAPTER 4
Miss Mitchell’s Comet
CHAPTER 5
“A Center of Rude Eyes and Tongues”
CHAPTER 6
The Shoulders of Giants
CHAPTER 7
The Yankee Corinnes
CHAPTER 8
A Mentor in Florence
CHAPTER 9
The War Years
CHAPTER 10
Vassar Female College
CHAPTER 11
No Miserable Bluestocking
CHAPTER 12
“Good Woman That She Is”
CHAPTER 13
The Undevout Astronomer
CHAPTER 14
Retrograde Motion
CHAPTER 15
Urania’s Inversion
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX