As Carson said, you cannot “write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry”. In Carson’s life and work the key thematic strands of Popova’s book crystallise, for Carson showed how the sciences “came together in a holistic understanding of nature”. She concludes with a moving portrait of the marine biologist and environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose writing showed that “science could be a literary subject”. Next comes Margaret Fuller, whose 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century “lit the Promethean fire of possibility for women”, followed by the sculptor Harriet Hosmer and poet Emily Dickinson. From Kepler, who dared to imagine space travel in the 17th century, Popova journeys on to another “soaring mind”, Maria Mitchell, who observed an eclipse in 1831 aged 12 and became America’s first professional woman astronomer. She begins with Johannes Kepler, “perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived”, a man who would “quarry the marble out of which classical physics would be sculpted”. Popova writes beautifully, translating abstractions into sensuous, evocative subjects, turning history and science into symphonic prose poetry. Her aim is to answer questions that “raze to the bone of life”, including the most profound of all: “How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?” Popova’s unique act of “figuring” in this book is to create resonances and synchronicities between the lives of visionary figures.

Her approach subverts the idea that lives “unfold in sensical narratives”. It interweaves the “invisible connections” between pioneering scientists, artists and writers – many of them gay women – to create a richly patterned tapestry of ideas and biographies. Her first book is also a highly original survey of life, love and creativity an intellectual odyssey that challenges easy categorisation.

“We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins.” Maria Popova is best known for her insightful and eclectic website Brain Pickings, an exploration of what she reads and “a record of my own becoming as a person”.

Figuring popova review