The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics
by Olivia Waite
The recap
Lucy Muchelney spent years helping her late father with his astronomical observations, only to find that the gentlemen of the scientific world have no intention of taking her seriously. Heartbroken after her former lover marries someone else, she seizes an unlikely opportunity: an important French treatise on the movements of the heavens needs translating, and Catherine St Day, the recently widowed Countess of Moth, whose late husband was an astronomer, is looking for someone to do it. Lucy talks her way into the work and into Catherine's quiet London house. Catherine, whose gift for embroidery was belittled throughout a cold, overbearing marriage, wants nothing now but peace. Yet as the two women work side by side, trading stars, stitches and late-night conversation, a tender attraction grows between them, shadowed by the men who would rather Lucy simply disappeared. Olivia Waite blends Regency romance with a heartfelt argument for women's place in science and art. It is a slow-burning, deeply romantic sapphic historical full of intelligence and warmth.
Why read it
For readers who want a tender, slow-burn sapphic romance with brains, stars and needlework, and who love seeing women claim space in history.
Fun facts
- 01
It opens Waite's Feminine Pursuits series, in which each heroine has a passion of her own; the second book, The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows (2020), pairs a printer with a beekeeper.
- 02
Lucy's project echoes real history: Mary Somerville's English version of Laplace's French treatise on celestial mechanics was published in 1831 as Mechanism of the Heavens, a link noted by the American Institute of Physics.
- 03
Waite is also a critic and has written the romance column for The New York Times Book Review.
- 04
BookPage gave the novel a starred review, calling her fiction just as elegant and incisive as her criticism.
