Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie

"I don’t know if I agree that Goldsmith suppresses all of the anger a twenty-first century feminist might feel about the way Marie Curie was treated by the broader scientific community. In describing the manoeuvring around Curie’s Nobel prize, for example, Goldsmith notes “a vicious sexism ripped away all pretense that Marie Curie might be accepted as an equal”, and proceeds to detail with a cold clarity all the ways in which Curie’s contributions were diminished. It isn’t a casual cultural sexism that Goldsmith describes, but a determined attempt to cast Marie as an assistant and muse, rather than as a scientist in her own right, by those with direct evidence to the contrary. I read Eve Curie’s biography of her mother as an impressionable nine year-old, which left me with a romanticized view of her genius and a deep desire to become a scientist, like Marie. To me, the strength of Goldsmith’s biography of Marie Curie is how it so clearly characterizes the depth of her obsession with her scholarly work in the face of almost unimaginable difficulties, from her struggles to afford her education in Paris to the loss of her beloved Pierre. Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is that Goldsmith does not gloss over Curie’s struggles with debilitating depression, one episode of which kept her from going to Stockholm to receive her first Nobel prize, and which occurred at intervals throughout her life. Nor does she downplay Curie’s flagrant disregard of the hazards of working with radioactive materials. I’m still inspired by Curie, but now as much by her persistence through her mental illness as by her discoveries."