Genre:

Reminiscences, Drollery

Subjects:

Gender, Education, Lecturing, Chemistry, Palaeontology, Domestic Economy

    The narrator describes how she was raised 'to ask questions about everything' and educated in 'all sorts of "ologies"' (x). She explains how, during her attendance of lectures at the Royal Institution, she met her husband to whom she displayed her chemical skills, but who was more interested in domestic matters and getting married than in such subjects as 'chemical affinities' and Michael Faraday's lectures on the candle. She had to remind her fiancé of Mary F G Somerville's argument that 'a woman may be deep in science, and make no worse wife for it'. Describes his anger at hearing about 'the scientific pretensions of the [female] sex'. (x–xi)