The Movement of Stars (36 page)

heavy acrid smell, a dim, distant thunder. Rising, ghost-like in white linen, she moved to the window. Isaac observed, unseen, as she drifted through the house—he realizes now it was the house on Little India, the old house—and up into her garret observatory, which both is and is not the one he remembers. Rather, this room holds all the things he remembers, the specimens and logbooks, the telescope and rocking horse, but all of it is bathed in an orange light streaming from the open arc of a giant dome atop the house. He had not expected such a grand structure on the small house, but it was so.

Hannah ascended the stair in full stride, wanting to see, needing to know. It was not the comet she sought, but something else. At the top of the stair she turned the crank on a small wheel and the whole of the roof began to revolve and then dissolve, diminishing with each turn until there was only sky, a blazing sky so bright that in the dream Hannah shielded her eyes, then released herself and rose, or the stair itself dropped away, and, blinded, Isaac closed his own eyes.

“Yes,” he says to Mary. “The stars were all burning at once.” They sit, quiet, in the stillness.
“I’d like to see the lighting ceremony,” Mary says. “Would you

Isaac nods and offers her his arm. Then he brings out his horse and cart and helps her up. They drive together through the deepening twilight as far as the old ironworks; Isaac has owned it for two decades, and as they draw up, the workers changing shifts wave.

Mary steps carefully. Already, the crowds have gathered along Main, the ladies in fashionable dresses, poufing and puffing in every direction, clinging to men in straw hats. They make way for the old woman in her plain dress and the dignified black man who accompanies her. Mary ignores them. She knows that when they look at her they see a ghost, a relic of the old Island, and she does not care any more than a tree cares what a raindrop thinks of its roots.

“Let’s go up to the top of Step Lane. The Veranda House is to be lit first, but we’ll see it all from there,” she says to Isaac.
He nods, and they turn on Centre, skirting the crowds along Water Street, and make their way up to the very top of the steep and narrow path. They can hear the voices booming from the bandstand, the Mayor no doubt touting his own role in the bringing of electric current, as if history itself had not borne this like a tide to their tiny Island. Slowly, by some signal, all the lamps are blown out at once, and an eerie quiet seeps over the path along with the dark. Quiet descends all the way down into the Town, thousands of voices stilled, waiting, reverent, invisible.
When they turn on the current, the vast hotel on the hillside bursts into view, a hundred electric lamps popping at once, like so many stars. After the Veranda, the Springfield is lit, then the Nantucket, and after the hotels come the lamps along Main Street. The Island blooms with light. All those around them on the high lane look down at Town. Isaac looks up.
Mizor and Alcor, Arcturus and Spica, Denebola and Regulus are disappearing, as if bowing their heads against the sudden blaze. Isaac lowers his head, too, then, and closes his eyes.
Forty miles away, on the mainland, for the first time, those who turn their gaze east, toward the horizon, observe a bright haze, a nimbus of light piercing the night sky where before there was only darkness.

had never heard of Maria Mitchell before taking a day trip to Nantucket in 1996. On the ferry, I picked up a flyer aimed at tourists, directing newcomers to Nantucket’s attractions. In one corner, a squib caught my eye:
Come and see the home of the famous girl astronomer from Nantucket!
The text explained that Maria Mitchell, born in 1818 to a large Quaker family, had shown interest and aptitude for observing the stars from a very young age. In spite of her isolated location and having only a high school education, she’d discovered a comet in 1847 and earned a medal from the king of Denmark for doing so. She went on to become the first professional female astronomer in America, and the founding professor of astronomy at Vassar College.

Girl astronomer.
I couldn’t get the phrase out of my head. What, I wondered, would compel a teenage girl to spend her nights alone on the roof of her house, staring at the stars for hours on end, sweeping the skies in hopes of spotting something so few people had the opportunity to see? The commitment required was beyond my understanding. I walked along the still-cobblestoned Main Street of Nantucket Town until I reached the side lane where the Mitchells had lived and observed. The little house and its garden of wildflowers bewitched me; my imagining of young Maria and her telescope took flight.

That half-day trip inspired a fifteen-year journey. I researched Maria Mitchell’s life and work, thinking that I wanted to write
about
her; what I ended up with, all these years and almost as many drafts later, is a novel that uses her work and accomplishments—not to mention the time period and many details from her life—as a leaping-off place for the journey of a character of my own creation: Hannah Gardner Price.

Hannah and Maria share a number of attributes: diligence and intellectual rigor; impatience with the constraints upon women’s freedom and education; a job at the Nantucket Atheneum; and a father and mentor without whose guidance they might not have progressed. Maria Mitchell and her father, William, worked for the U.S. Coast Survey, and enjoyed a cordial relationship with their friends, William Cranch Bond and George Phillips Bond of Cambridge, overseers of the Harvard Observatory (though my characterizations of the Bonds, including George’s romantic interest in Hannah, are entirely invented). The Mitchells were members of the Society of Friends at a particularly rigid moment in that body’s history: though fond of the Edward Young quote that appears in this novel
(“An undevout astronomer is mad”
), Maria Mitchell was indeed disowned from Meeting at age twenty-five (albeit in a much less dramatic fashion than Hannah) after professing that her mind was “unsettled on religious matters.”

Many of the details of Hannah’s home and professional life were drawn from my visits to the Mitchell house and archives on Nantucket, from Maria Mitchell’s journals, and from her sister Phebe’s recollections of the family’s early years. Among those scenes inspired by the above sources are: the laying of the meridian stones outside the Pacific National Bank (which Maria Mitchell did with her father); and the meeting with Mary Somerville, which took place in 1858, eleven years later than Hannah’s scene with her occurs in the novel. Hannah’s astronomy journals are modeled after those kept by Maria Mitchell, as are the circumstances of the award from the king of Denmark; her work for the
Nautical Almanac
(which wasn’t actually published in the United States until 1852); and membership in various astronomical and scientific societies.

I placed Hannah at certain real events that Maria Mitchell was not present for, such as the first use of the Great Refractor at Harvard (which happened in 1847, not 1846). Miss Mitchell was living on Nantucket in 1846 when a massive fire destroyed a third of the town, but there’s no record of what she did during the conflagration other than (allegedly) burning her own journals rather than risk her privacy should the fire reach their home and blow the pages into the street. To the best of my knowledge, the astronomy that appears in the book is accurate for the time period in which it is portrayed, with the exception of the meteor shower Eta Aquarids, which was not discovered until the 1860s; the discovery of the eighth satellite of Saturn, which actually occurred in 1848; and the photograph of the stars Mizor and Alcor that Hannah Price carries to Europe in 1847. That photograph was actually taken in 1857.

In every other way, Hannah Gardner Price’s story is a product of my imagination. Her twin brother and the rest of her family life, her actions, and her personal relationships, including the one with Isaac Martin, are entirely fictional. In inventing Hannah’s journey, I tried to remain faithful to the spirit of Maria Mitchell: independent, industrious, and above all truthful.

As a novelist, I’m grateful I came across Miss Mitchell’s story as a source of inspiration; as a woman, I’m thankful for her lifelong advocacy on behalf of women’s education and women’s suffrage. Without women like her who paved the way for their peers in every profession, the life I have crafted for myself— not to mention this book—would not have been possible.

he initial inspiration for this book came from the writings of Maria Mitchell, as provided to me by the Maria Mitchell Association archive on Nantucket, and as collected in the volumes noted below (though none from her young adulthood have survived to the present day).

In constructing daily life among Nantucket’s Quaker community in the mid-nineteenth century, the practice of astronomy and celestial navigation at that time, as well as life on a whaleship, I drew on a number of additional sources, the most salient of which I’ve listed here:

Albers, Henry.
Maria Mitchell: A Life in Journals and Letters.
Clinton Corners, N.Y.: College Avenue Press, 2001.
Bacon, Margaret Hope.
The Quiet Rebels: The Story of the Quakers in America
. Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill Publications, 1999.
Birns, Susan M. “Nineteenth-Century Black Life on Nantucket.” Research paper UMass 15, University of Massachusetts Humanities Program on Nantucket, 1975.
Bolster, W. Jeffrey. “ ‘To Feel Like a Man’: Black Seamen in the Northern States, 1800–1860.”
The Journal of American History
76, no. 4 (March 1990).
Bowditch, Nathaniel.
The New American Practical Navigator: Being an Epitome of Navigation
. New York: E. & G. W. Blunt, 1841.
Dell, Burnham N. “Quakerism on Nantucket.”
Historic Nantucket
2, no. 3 (January 1955).
Ferris, Timothy.
Coming of Age in the Milky Way.
New York: William Morrow, 1988.
Gormley, Beatrice.
Maria Mitchell: The Soul of an Astronomer.
Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1995.
Johnson, Robert, Jr.
Nantucket’s People of Color: Essays on History, Politics, and Community.
University Press of America, 2006. Errata and commentary by the Nantucket Historical Association.
Karttunen, Frances Ruley.
The Other Islanders: People Who Pulled Nantucket’s Oars.
New Bedford, Mass.: Spinner Publications, 2005.
Kelly, Catherine E.
In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1999.
Leach, Robert J., and Peter Gow
. Quaker Nantucket
:
The Religious Community Behind the Whaling Empire.
Nantucket, Mass.: Mill Hill Press, 1996.
Linebaugh, Barbara.
The African School and the Integration of Nantucket Public Schools, 1825–1847.
Brookline, Mass.: Boston University, 1978.
Loomis, Elias.
The Recent Progress of Astronomy; Especially in the United States.
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850.
Mitchell, Maria.
Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals.
Compiled by Phebe Mitchell Kendall. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1896.
Norling, Lisa.
Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000.
Panek, Richard.
Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope Opened Our Eyes and Minds to the Heaven
s
.
New York: Penguin, 1998.
Philbrick, Nathaniel.
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship
Essex
.
New York: Viking, 2000.
Rey, H. A.
The Stars: A New Way to See Them.
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
Sobel, Dava:
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
New York: Walker, 2007.

In addition, relevant issues of the
Nantucket Inquirer
and the
Nantucket Mirror
were extremely helpful to my research, as were additional articles from
Proceedings of the Nantucket Historical Association
and
Historic Nantucket.

I also drew on the following American Antiquarian Society holdings: Chase family papers, Abigail Gardner Drew diaries, Abigail Foster Kelley papers, and especially the Gardner Family Papers, from which came the text of the fluttering note in chapter 21 of the book (“Absence must be longer than life . . .”). The “vast Leviathan” note in the same chapter is from William Hazlitt’s
Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy.

The Meriwether Lewis quote in chapter 9 (“I had as yet done but little . . .”) is from
The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
edited by Gary E. Moulton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983–2001). The citations in chapter 24 are from Margaret Fuller’s
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
(“We would have every path laid open to women . . .”) and an 1854 address by William Lloyd Garrison delivered at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York (“I cannot but regard oppression in every form . . .”). The image of the celestial sphere as the underside of a giant umbrella is drawn from H. A. Rey’s
The Stars: A New Way to See Them.