She was clearly a genius, but her success against all odds was equally due to her obsessive efforts. There was a passionate attachment to a young man whose family rejected her because she was of the wrong social class, but at 23 she set off for Paris to join 22 other women enrolled in the School of Sciences. Despite the prohibition on women studying at Warsaw University, Marie Curie attended a clandestine academy of higher education for women while she worked as a governess to raise enough money to pay for her sister and herself to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. Until her early death, her mother was emotionally and physically distant because she had TB, and her schoolteacher father drove her insistently to achieve academically at school.

This book explores the woman behind the scant lines in the school text-book, revealing that Curie was Polish, not French, and that she suffered from depressive episodes throughout her life. She died, aged 67 in 1934, refusing to believe that years of exposure to radioactivity in the laboratory had contributed to her death… This was at a time when women were denied opportunity to vote, to study and to attend university, and Curie made her remarkable discoveries after marriage and having children. Like everyone else of my generation I learned at school about Marie Curie as the discoverer of radioactivity, and I was impressed by the fact that in 1903 she was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Science, (jointly with her husband), going on to win it again in her own right in 1911 for her discovery of polonium and radium.

Obsessive Genius by Barbara Goldsmith