Mary Acworth Orr was, astronomer and literary scholar, was born on 1 January 1867 at Plymouth Hoe, the fifth child and third daughter of Andrew Orr (d. 1870), an officer in the Royal Artillery, and his wife, Lucy Acworth. Her father died when she was only three years old and the family went to live with their maternal grandfather, a priest in the Church of England, first at Wimborne and then at South Stoke near Bath.
Mary and her youngest sister, Lucy, the close companion of her childhood, were educated entirely at home. When Mary was twenty the two sisters travelled abroad to study languages and the arts. They spent the years 1888–90 in Florence where they began studying the work of Dante and where Mary, who from an early age had an interest in astronomy, became fascinated by the astronomical references in Dante's poetry.
Following this, their mother and all four daughters lived for five years in Australia, near Sydney in New South Wales, where Mary got to know the astronomer John Tebbutt at his observatory at Windsor. Finding that there existed no simple star charts of the southern sky she produced An Easy Guide to the Southern Stars (1897) with a foreword by Tebbutt.
The Orr family returned to England in 1895. Mary, already since 1891 a member of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, joined the British Astronomical Association in London and strove to become a serious amateur observer. From 1900 onwards at her home in Frimley, Surrey, she used a 3 in. refractor to make observations of variable stars; she appeared in Stroobant's list of the world's astronomers compiled for the year 1902.
In 1906 plans were afoot for Miss Orr to work with E. T. Whitaker, whose wife was a cousin of hers, at Dunsink observatory, Dublin, presumably on a voluntary basis. These came to nothing with her marriage to John Evershed (1864–1956), whom she had first met in 1896 on the British Astronomical Association's clouded-out eclipse expedition to Norway. She moved with him to India on his appointment as assistant director of the Kodaikanal observatory.
The Eversheds spent the years 1906–23 in Kodaikanal, Evershed being promoted to director of the observatory in 1911. The observatory was entirely devoted to solar work in which Mrs Evershed, though not a formal member of staff, took a keen interest. She published in 1913 an important paper on active solar prominences, illustrated with a number of fine spectroheliograms. She also acted as her husband's assistant on an expedition to observe the total solar eclipse of 1922 in Australia, and on his expeditions to Kashmir and to New Zealand to test astronomical observing sites.
