Mary Evershed (née Orr, known as Mindie to her friends) was a British astronomer and historian of astronomy who lived for some years in India with her husband, John Evershed, also an astronomer. Born in Plymouth, she moved to Wimborne in Dorset after her father, Captain Andrew Orr, R.A., died while she was still an infant. She spent her later childhood near Bath and in her 20th year went to Germany and Italy to study languages and the arts.
Evershed's horizons were further broadened during a five-year sojourn in Australia and New Zealand with her mother and three sisters, beginning in 1890. Her interest in both plants and the stars came to the fore at this time and she made collections of plants in Tasmania and Western Australia before returning to England, where she joined the British Astronomical Association. Her publication, Easy Guide to Southern Stars, appeared in 1896 and over the next four years she made two trips to witness eclipses in Vadso, Norway, and in Algiers. Her travels continued after her marriage in 1906 to fellow astronomer John Evershed (1864-1956), with whom she set out for India via the United States and Japan.
John Evershed had been appointed assistant director of the Kodaikanal Observatory in the Palani Hills of southern India, where the couple lived happily and fruitfully for many years. John was promoted to director of the observatory in 1911. Alongside her stargazing, Mary Evershed took the opportunity to collect plants in the vicinity, which were deposited in the herbarium of the British Museum in 1957. She published a number of astronomical works with her husband and also the book Dante and the Early Astronomer (1913) during this period. This was published under her maiden name, Orr.
Returning to England in 1923 Evershed was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and seven years later founded the Historical Section of the British Astronomical Association. Among her works in the following years was a biographical dictionary of named lunar craters, Who's Who in the Moon (1938). Before her twilight years she joined three more eclipse expeditions, to Australia (1922), Yorkshire (1927) and Greece (1936). Evershed's garden at her home in Pitch Hill, Surrey, was admired by many, though little has been written about her interest in botany and horticulture.
Sources:
A. Blaauw, 1971, "Mary Acworth Evershed née Orr (1867–1949), Solar Physicist and Dante Scholar", Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, 1: 45-59
M.T. Brück, 2007, "Evershed, Mary Ackworth Orr", The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, 5: 351-352
M.A. El., 1950, The Observatory, 70: 31-32.
