Wendy Moore at Literary Review:
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.’
more here.
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