Sir Charles Orr's Memoirs Volume 3

Mary Acworth Orr

Mary Orr was Charles' older sister. She became a notable astronomer initially fascinated by the astronomical allusions in Dante's Inferno. She was born at the Citadel on Plymouth Hoe where her father was a gunner in 1867. She lived at Highbridge House in Frimley with her other and two sisters from 1901. As we have seen from these memoirs the family had travelled widely and Mary had used these occasions to record eclipses and other astronomical measurements. From Highbridge she published papers in the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1899, 1902 and again in 1902 in the Journal of the British Astronomical Society. She also appears in French Astronomical Society year book of 1904 and the Belgian society of 1903. She married a fellow astronomer John Evershed in 1906 whereby she took on the name Mary Acworth Evershed. They moved to India to work at the Kodaikanal Observatory and followed in her brother's footsteps to Kashmir to take more astronomical measurements. She died in 1949. She wrote Dante and the Early Astronomer whilst in India.
Image courtesy of Science Museum
A 1949 article about Mary's career is available to read: Image courtesy of here

Charles Orr's Memoirs Volume 3 | Plymouth