- She Caught the Light: Williamina Stevens Fleming: Astronomer by Kathryn Lasky
Lasky, Kathryn She Caught the Light: Williamina Stevens Fleming: Astronomer; illus. by Julianna Swaney. HarperCollins, 2021 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780062849304 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780063089587 $12.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R 6-9 yrs
Early in her childhood in nineteenth-century Scotland, Williamina was fascinated by the pictures that emerged from the glass plates in her father's camera, but after he died, that enthusiasm had to be put on hold. By age fourteen Mina was a teacher, and by age twenty she was married, pregnant, and abandoned by her husband shortly after immigration to America. She took work as a maid in the household of the Harvard College Observatory director, impressing Professor Pickering with her curiosity and her deftness at sorting results from star spectrographs, which were not so very different to her from the images her father had produced. Shattering a very thick glass ceiling, Fleming became the first female Harvard employee and an innovator in interpreting the chemical composition of stars, creator of a star catalogue, discoverer of the Horsehead Nebula, and advocate for women's advancement in the field of astronomy. Swaney's ruddy-cheeked, doll-like figures seem at odds with the biography of so resilient and accomplished a woman and her stubbornly conservative employer (neither Fleming nor other female "computers" were allowed to peer through the telescope), but Lasky's effective explanation of how Fleming "read" her spectrographs fully respects the science capability of her listeners. A timeline, and glossary, and bibliography are included, along with an author's note that discusses the contributions of Fleming's female colleagues and how quantum theory later shifted star analysis from chemical composition to temperature. [End Page 220]