The Time Engine

Eric Finch is a schoolboy in 1938 Cambridge, England. His parents are both highly intelligent, his father is a professor at the University of Cambridge and his mother is a mathematician who was top of her class when his parents met there. His father is still a professor, while his mother, though fiercely intelligent, is confined to the home because it is thought that she has mental health problems.

With modern eyes, it may have been a purely patriarchal confinement though Galvin never explicitly states this. One morning in March 1938, both Eric’s parents receive separate letters. His father is called to war work and initially we are not told the contents of his mother’s letter although her husband tells her to burn it in the fireplace. Thankfully, she does not.

When Eric returns home unexpectedly from school, he finds his mother has been in the attic. He heard a strange thump and she will not tell him why. He discovers that she has found the drawings made by a young Ada Lovelace for a prototype time engine and his mum has been building it in secret. He then goes back to 1828. Will he manage to return and will the fabric of history remain intact?

The key to this short novel to which there needs to be a sequel, is the feminist thread which is embedded and how much women, both Eric’s mother and a young Ada Lovelace, have to fight to get their intelligence seen and validated by the society they live in.