Mathematician Meets Viscount
In which our heroine finds the common denominator between math and romance.
“These bleak weeks of March more resembled February, an in-between time when the sun sullenly peeked out from behind the clouds now and then, waiting for the world to be pretty enough to bother with.”
Elizabeth Everett’s description of the season in the opening pages of A Perfect Equation exactly mirrored my own environment as I was reading, but the romance Everett spins in her novel provides the perfect remedy for end-of-winter doldrums: A slow unfurling of admiration and desire between an unlikely yet inevitable pair of lovers.
The lovers in question are Viscount Greycliffe (known more familiarly as Grey) and Miss Letitia Fenley (known to her friends as Letty). Grey is a Darcy type: handsome, brooding, and not very good at social interaction. At one point, contemplating a ball he must attend, he admits to himself that he has “avoided as many balls as he could through the years, accepting the alternative: being thought a cold fish.” Letty is of lower social rank and higher spirits than Grey, and though she loves reading novels, her greatest passion is for mathematics.
The two are thrown together when they are asked to manage Athena’s Retreat—a semi-secret society for women scientists—in the absence of its founder, Lady Violet, who is Grey’s former stepmother and Letty’s close friend (and the heroine of Everett’s first book, A Lady’s Formula For Love).
Grey and Letty begin the novel at each other’s throats (and not in a sexy way). Their dislike for each other stems from a misunderstanding about events in Letty’s past. Grey mistakenly believes that she was guilty of trying to entrap his cousin into marriage; Letty is not mistaken in believing that she is the object of Grey’s disdain. Of the two of them, Grey is the one who most needs to realize and revise his prejudices.
But though Grey is overly proud and obsessed with furthering his own prospects within the British government, he is not the villain of the story. That role goes to one Lord Armitage, whose rhetoric is similar to some 21st century demagogues: When confronted with the possibilities of women in the workforce and efforts to give working men the vote, he says, “We must return this country to the ways that made us great.”
That kind of rhetoric, of course, is in direct opposition to semi-secret societies for women scientists, and Grey and Letty soon find themselves dealing with an existential threat to Athena’s Retreat. As Grey discovers some of the hidden delights of Athena’s Retreat (a pet hedgehog, fun chemistry explosions, and a number of wonderful, eccentric women), he also comes to understand the importance of the safe space that it provides for its members. And he becomes more and more enamored and entangled with Letty (this time, in a sexy way).
And even as she is busy falling in love with Grey and trying to save the Athena Retreat, Letty is also working to prepare her entry to a prestigious mathematics competition—one that a woman has never entered—by offering a solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Students of math will know that that particular mathematical problem was not solved in the 19th century, and Everett does not veer from the history in this instance. However, Letty is still able to break boundaries, and her mathematical mind does enable her to make an impassioned defense of romance, too:
“I believe in mathematics. I believe in the scientific laws governing our universe, and the infinite equations that allow humans to find a way together. I believe mistakes can be mended, grudges can be reconciled, mysteries solved, and happy endings can come to each of us.”
The romance—happy ending and all—that Everett delivers is certainly worthy of Letty’s belief.
Also by Elizabeth Everett
A Perfect Equation is the sequel to Everett’s first book, A Lady’s Formula For Love. It is not strictly necessary to read them in order, but I would recommend both books.
More Books Featuring Nineteenth Century Bluestockings:
A Week to Be Wicked by Tessa Dare
A Rogue of One’s Own by Evie Dunmore
The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan (See also Milan’s novella, Talk Sweetly To Me, for another mathematician heroine)