Marie Curie’s life was defined by professional triumph and personal tragedy. Ninety years after her death, she remains history’s most famous woman scientist. Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize – in 1903, she and her husband, Pierre, received the award for physics. In 1911, she was awarded a second Nobel Prize, this time for chemistry. She is still the only Nobel laureate to be garlanded in two scientific fields.

Yet after her husband’s death in a freak traffic accident in 1906, just eleven years into their marriage, she led a sorrowful and often lonely existence dedicated to continuing the work they had begun together. Meeting Curie in 1920, an American journalist described her as ‘a pale, timid little woman in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face I had ever looked upon’. She was selfless and self-effacing too. When asked to write an autobiography, Curie dictated a single paragraph: ‘I was born in Warsaw of a family of teachers. I married Pierre Curie and had two children. I have done my work in France.’

Of course, as Dava Sobel amply demonstrates in her warm, moving and effervescent biography, there is much more to Curie’s life than one staid paragraph. Born Marya Skłodowska in 1867, she left school at fifteen and – despite graduating top of her class – was barred from university on the grounds of her gender. After raising funds through teaching and learning chemistry from textbooks, she joined her sister Bronya in Paris, where she changed her name to Marie. She enrolled in the science department of the Sorbonne, becoming one of twenty-three women there among nearly two thousand men. Surviving in a bare garret on bread and eggs, she completed her degree in two years, coming first in her class, and won a postgraduate scholarship to research the magnetic properties of steel. Typically, she gave a large portion of her earnings from that research to fund a scholarship for another student.

It was at the Sorbonne that she met Pierre Curie, a quiet, gentle, serious man who had recently been made a professor in the school of industrial physics and chemistry. They married in 1895, had two daughters, Irène and Eve, and worked side by side in a cold and leaking shed investigating the new field of radioactivity (the term was coined by Marie). Together, they identified two new elements, which they named polonium and radium. As dedicated to each other as they were to their work, they forged a harmonious, equal partnership. ‘I have the best husband one could dream of’, wrote Marie, ‘and the more we live together the more we love each other’. 

When Pierre was nominated for the Nobel Prize, he insisted Marie share it with him. The award brought them global fame – one American wanted to name a racehorse after Marie – and professional status: the Sorbonne named Pierre professor of general physics and gave him a spacious new laboratory, in which Marie became chief of operations. Pierre’s death came as a devastating blow. Marie agreed to take over his roles as professor – becoming the first female professor in Europe – and director of his laboratory more out of a sense of duty than desire. Writing after his death, she explained that this would be the ‘easiest’ way for her to live, though she feared she was ‘mad to attempt it’. 

A superb storyteller, Sobel devotes the bulk of her book to relating Curie’s life after widowhood. She doggedly continued her research, travelled widely and won numerous accolades while navigating debilitating grief, frequent illnesses – partly due to radiation exposure – and the demands of bringing up two daughters. Yet Sobel has also adopted the novel approach of interweaving into her book the life stories of some forty-five other women scientists whom Curie recruited and mentored. 

Like Curie, these protégées had to overcome institutional barriers and deep-seated prejudices. Some did not last the course. Harriet Brooks became the first woman to gain a master’s degree in physics at McGill University, Montreal, before becoming a physics tutor at Barnard College, the women-only branch of Columbia University, New York. But when she announced plans to marry she was invited to resign – a common policy in most educational establishments at the time. She broke off her engagement but decided to resign anyway. She spent a short stint at Curie’s lab before returning to Canada to marry another man and giving up scientific work entirely.

Others soared to new heights thanks to Curie’s tutelage. Ellen Gleditsch studied pharmacy in her native Norway. After working alongside Curie for five years, she went home to teach her country’s first university course in radioactivity. She became the first woman to work in the physics lab at Yale University, where she established the half-life of radium. Later, she returned to Norway, where she was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Oslo – though only after Curie and other supporters had intervened to force a misogynist dean to overturn his decision to block her appointment. Irén Götz, another Curie recruit, originally from Budapest, became the first female professor at a Hungarian university. Sobel’s sketches of the brilliant, determined women scientists who overcame extreme obstacles to pursue their ambitions – and those who failed – provide a humbling backdrop to the story of Curie’s life. Yet often Sobel fails to bring them fully to life – they flit in and out of the narrative like spectres. 

Even as she encouraged these promising pupils, Curie took the helm at the physics department of Paris’s new Radium Institute, lectured worldwide and fostered global scientific collaboration. When she was awarded her second Nobel Prize, she was urged not to travel to Stockholm to collect it; a scandal had erupted after the exposure of her affair with a fellow scientist, Paul Langevin. She went anyway. On the outbreak of the First World War, she organised eighteen mobile X-ray units, using donated cars, and visited the front with her daughter Irène, not yet eighteen, to help diagnose wounded soldiers. She worked to the last, despite crippling ill health. She died in 1934, aged sixty-six. Irène took over her mother’s former role at the Radium Institute and went on to share a Nobel Prize for chemistry with her own husband, Frédéric Joliot, for her work on radioisotopes. 

So long as women still battle to achieve equal status in science, Curie’s trailblazing life will remain a powerful inspiration. Sobel’s book is a luminous and illuminating contribution to the cause.