Agnes M. Clerke

Agnes Mary Clerke (10 February 1842 – 20 January 1907) was an Irish astronomer and writer. She published a number of books on the history of astronomy and on the then-nascent field of astrophysics.

Family

Agnes Clerke was the daughter of John William Clerke (c. 1814–1890) who was, at the time, a bank manager in Skibbereen, County Cork, and his wife Catherine Mary Deasy (born circa 1819) whose father was a judge's registrar. She had two siblings; her older sister, Ellen Mary (1840–1906) and her younger brother, Aubrey St. John (1843–1923). Her elder sister Ellen also wrote about astronomy. All of the Clerke children were entirely home schooled.

Catherine Clerke was educated at the Ursuline Convent school, and therefore placed a great deal of importance on the education of young girls.

Life and work

Following in her father's footsteps—while studying classics, he had also taken courses in astronomy—she developed an interest in astronomy from an early age. Using her father's 4-inch telescope in her observations, she had begun to write a history of astronomy at the age of 15.

In 1861, aged 19, her family moved to Dublin, and in 1863 to Queenstown (present-day Cobh). At the age of 25, partly for health reasons together with her elder sister Ellen, she went to Italy where she stayed until 1877, chiefly at Florence, studying science, languages, and other subjects that would be useful in their later lives. In 1877, she settled in London.

Upon her return, she was able to get two articles written while she had been in Italy, "Brigandage in Sicily" and "Copernicus in Italy", published in the Edinburgh Review of October 1877. This led to her being asked by Adam and Charles Black, publishers of the Review, who also published the Encyclopædia Britannica, to write biographies of a number of famous scientists for the ninth edition of the encyclopedia.