Madame Curie | Introduction
‘‘The life of Marie Curie contains prodigies in such number that one would like to tell her story like a legend.’’ Madame Curie is the classic biography of Marie Curie, who is as well-known for her uniquely close collaboration with her husband, Pierre Curie, as for her ground-breaking accomplishments in the study of radiation. Marie Curie won the 1903 Nobel Prize for physics, along with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, for isolating new elements they called polonium and radium. She won a second Nobel Prize, in chemistry, in 1911.
Curie was born in 1867 into a poor but intellectually active family of teachers in Warsaw, Poland, then under the rule of the Russian empire. In 1891, she moved to Paris to pursue a higher education at the Sorbonne. There, her dedication to her studies bordered on obsession, aggravated by extreme poverty, so that she spent years studying long into the night, in unfurnished rooms with little light and no heat, subsisting on little more than bread and tea. She earned a master’s degree in physics in 1893 and a master’s in mathematics in 1894. In 1895, she married Pierre Curie, a physicist with whom she was to spend the next eleven years in close scientific collaboration, until his untimely death in 1906. Inconsolable about this personal loss, Marie took over Pierre’s post as professor and continued alone the work they had begun together. Her final years were spent in dedication to her work as director of the Radium Institute in Paris, which had been established to accommodate her many students and lab assistants. She died in 1934 of leukemia, the result of years spent handling radioactive materials.
Madame Curie (1937), written by Marie’s younger daughter Eve Curie, approaches the life of this world-famous scientist from several perspectives. The now legendary relationship between Marie and Pierre Curie, which Eve describes as a perfect bond based on personal affection and the shared belief in the ‘‘spirit of science,’’ is central to this story. Marie’s status as a pioneer woman in the field of science places this book in the category of biographies of great women in history. Although she lived most of her adult life in Paris, Marie’s identity as a Pole, having lived under the oppressive regime of the Russian empire, continued to be important throughout her life. Finally, in Madame Curie, Eve Curie describes Marie’s scientific work in terms easily understandable to the general reader unfamiliar with the field.
Madame Curie Summary
Early Life in Poland
Marie Curie, the subject of Madame Curie, was born Marie Sklodovska (or Sklodowska) on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland, the fifth and youngest child in her family. As a child, her nickname was Manya. Curie’s family were Polish nationalists during the long period in which Poland was a part of the Russian empire. Her father, Vladislav Sklodovski, was a professor of mathematics and physics, while her mother was a director and teacher at a school for girls.
Curie experienced tragedy early in life, when her sister Zosia died of typhus and her mother died of tuberculosis. Not long before these losses, Curie’s father’s salary had been drastically reduced due to political tensions with the Russian authorities. Upon graduating from high school in 1883, Curie enjoyed a year of freedom, during which she spent time staying with relatives and family friends in the country. Returning to Warsaw, she and her siblings began tutoring in order to supplement her father’s now meager income, which had been made worse when he lost all of his savings in a poor stock investment.
Curie became involved with the Polish nationalist intelligentsia in Warsaw, which formed a ‘‘Floating University’’ to study and teach subjects forbidden by the Russian authorities. Curie thus became interested in the school of thought known as ‘‘positivism.’’ Part of the philosophy of her intellectual environment was that Polish resistance to Russian imperial authority should be exercised through the education of poor Poles, rather than through violent revolutionary activities. At eighteen, she began working as a governess. Her first position, with a wealthy Polish family, was unbearable to her, and she described it as a ‘‘prison’’ and a ‘‘hell.’’ But she and her sister Bronya had agreed that she would work to support Bronya’s attendance at medical school in Paris, an arrangement Marie had suggested. Her next position was as a governess in a wealthy family living in the country outside of Warsaw. There, she was treated with respect and kindness and even found time to tutor the impoverished children of the local rural community. However, when she fell in love with the eldest son of the family, they disapproved of his proposal of marriage because of Curie’s poverty. Although she stayed on with the family, her heart was broken when her first love gave in to his family’s wishes and broke off the relationship. After three years with this family, she took a position working for a wealthy woman in Warsaw while also learning and teaching for the first time in a science lab set up by the ‘‘Floating University.’’
Education in Paris
Complete Madame Curie Summary
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