SWEEPER OF THE SKIES

The comet-spangled career of Caroline Herschel, fictionalized and set down in anecdotal detail -- how a stunted (4'3""), pockmarked girl dreamed of being more than a household drudge and realized that dream both as a singer and as a scientist. Her father had instructed all his sons in music as their only legacy, and the eldest took Caroline with him to Bath. Their successful partnership in music was followed by even greater success and renown in astronomy, as Caroline ground the dung for the telescopes and William swept the skies. The self-effacing little lady finally spotted some comets on her own and was honored in England and in her native Hanover. Spanning the stretch between two Halley's Comets, a biography as modest as its womanly subject and almost as mundane -- little information outside the facts of her life, little to hold a reader's attention.