Evershed Acworth, Mary [née Orr] (1867–1949)

Title

Mary, Evershed Acworth, [née Orr]

Author

Evershed Acworth, Mary [née Orr] (1867–1949)

Pseudonym

M. A. Orr

Date

1867–1949

Place of origin

Plymouth Hoe

Highbroom, Ewhurst, Surrey

Country of origin

England, United Kingdom

Language

English

Profession

Astronomer

Scholar

Author

Wrote articles for Journal of the British Astronomical Association

Member of learned society

British Astronomical Association

Biographical details

Mary Acworth Orr was, astronomer and literary scholar, was born on 1 January 1867 at Plymouth Hoe, the fifth child and third daughter of Andrew Orr (d. 1870), an officer in the Royal Artillery, and his wife, Lucy Acworth. Her father died when she was only three years old and the family went to live with their maternal grandfather, a priest in the Church of England, first at Wimborne and then at South Stoke near Bath.

Mary and her youngest sister, Lucy, the close companion of her childhood, were educated entirely at home. When Mary was twenty the two sisters travelled abroad to study languages and the arts. They spent the years 1888–90 in Florence where they began studying the work of Dante and where Mary, who from an early age had an interest in astronomy, became fascinated by the astronomical references in Dante's poetry.

Following this, their mother and all four daughters lived for five years in Australia, near Sydney in New South Wales, where Mary got to know the astronomer John Tebbutt at his observatory at Windsor. Finding that there existed no simple star charts of the southern sky she produced An Easy Guide to the Southern Stars (1897) with a foreword by Tebbutt.

The Orr family returned to England in 1895. Mary, already since 1891 a member of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, joined the British Astronomical Association in London and strove to become a serious amateur observer. From 1900 onwards at her home in Frimley, Surrey, she used a 3 in. refractor to make observations of variable stars; she appeared in Stroobant's list of the world's astronomers compiled for the year 1902.

In 1906 plans were afoot for Miss Orr to work with E. T. Whitaker, whose wife was a cousin of hers, at Dunsink observatory, Dublin, presumably on a voluntary basis. These came to nothing with her marriage to John Evershed (1864–1956), whom she had first met in 1896 on the British Astronomical Association's clouded-out eclipse expedition to Norway. She moved with him to India on his appointment as assistant director of the Kodaikanal observatory.

The Eversheds spent the years 1906–23 in Kodaikanal, Evershed being promoted to director of the observatory in 1911. The observatory was entirely devoted to solar work in which Mrs Evershed, though not a formal member of staff, took a keen interest. She published in 1913 an important paper on active solar prominences, illustrated with a number of fine spectroheliograms. She also acted as her husband's assistant on an expedition to observe the total solar eclipse of 1922 in Australia, and on his expeditions to Kashmir and to New Zealand to test astronomical observing sites.

Mrs Evershed's early years in India were largely taken up with her study of the astronomy of Dante, published in her book Dante and the Early Astronomers (1913). Much of the research had been done before her marriage, and as author she adopted the style 'M. A. Orr (Mrs John Evershed)'. The book, comprising the history of astronomy until the age of Dante and an elucidation of the numerous astronomical allusions in Dante's writings, has been described by Dorothy Sayers, a translator of the first two books of the Divina commedia, as 'quite the best guide available to Ptolemaic astronomy and to Dante's handling of celestial phenomena' (Sayers, bibliography). Dante and the Early Astronomers, published by a firm of scientific publishers, did not reach a wide public. A second edition, prepared by Barbara Reynolds, who came across a copy of the book by chance some thirty years after its first appearance, was published in 1956 after Mrs Evershed's death; this remains a standard work of reference in Dante bibliographies.

Obituary Notice

Selected publications

Selected articles in academic journals published as M. A. Evershed

(1914). Dante and Halley's Comet. Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 24:362-363.

(1914). The Astronomy of Dante. Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 34:14-321.

(1931). Dante's Virgil. Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 41:32-34.

(1931). Women astronomers. Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 42:48-9.

Books

(1914) Dante and the Early Astronomers. London. Edinburgh.Gall & Inglis.

Dante and the Early Astronomers

Dante and the Early Astronomers

Relation

Anglophone women writers