Technologies of automathographies: Mary Somerville and the Republic of Mathematics

This paper reads Mary Somerville’s Personal Recollections as an archive of automathography, tracing her desire to become a mathematician within the constraints of Victorian auto/biography. It argues that mathematics is both the object of Somerville’s desire and the driving force of her retrospective gaze. While shaped by significant editorial interventions, the memoir mobilizes the conventions of life writing to negotiate gendered discourses of knowledge, authority, and intellectual legitimacy. Somerville’s love for mathematics emerges early in her narrative, then recedes into the background—sustained through selective editorial strategies such as the inclusion of letters, social anecdotes, and accounts of intellectual affiliation—before resurfacing with intensity in the final chapters as a site of longing and loss. By reading the Recollections through an automathographic lens, this paper reveals a dynamic rhythm of presence and absence in the telling of Somerville’s mathematical becoming. In doing so, it argues that her memoir does not merely reflect on a life of mathematical passion; it actively founds and sustains her place within the Republic of Mathematics—a domain historically shaped by masculine affiliation but reimagined here through the intimate logic of automathographical desire.