Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn

Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn (1834 – 21 February 1926) was a Welsh astronomer and pioneer in scientific photography. Biography The eldest of six children, Llewelyn was born to photographer and botanist John Dillwyn Llewelyn and Emma Thomasina Talbot at Penllergare House in Glamorganshire. Along with her parents, her extended family were active in the fields of science in photography, including her mother's cousin the photographer Henry Fox Talbot and her aunt, Mary Dillwyn, one of earliest female photographers in Wales. Llewelyn developed an interest in photography and astronomy, although both were uncommon endeavours for women in the Victorian era. Her cousins were the sisters novelist and industrialist Amy Dillwyn and the lepidopterist Mary De la Beche Nicholl. Llewelyn married Nevil Story-Maskelyne, a professor of mineralogy at Oxford University, on 29 June 1858. Through him, she began a correspondence with Charles Darwin. Together they had two daughters: Mary, who later married politician and writer H. O. Arnold-Forster, and Domestic science advocate Thereza who went on to marry physicist Arthur William Rucker. Scientific work and photography Due to Llewelyn's interest in astronomy, her father constructed an equatorial observatory at Penllergare Valley Woods for her sixteenth birthday. The construction of the observatory was a family affair, as Llewelyn described the event in an 1851 letter to her father: I laid the foundation stone of the observatory today, July 7th. When Grandpa and Grandmama were here on Saturday we told them about it and they were so very kind as to come over here today and to see the first stone laid; so we went in procession to the place; they had got some stone already and after I had laid the first stone [my younger sisters] Emma laid the second and Elinor the third, which she was very much delighted to do.