Luminous Bodies: A Novel of Marie Curie

The name Marie Curie conjures up X-ray cars and electrometers, black-and-white photos of a researcher in a lab (often beside her husband, Pierre Curie), and the Nobel Prizes. But what about the woman, the daughter, wife, mother, friend, and lover?

Based on years of meticulous research, Luminous Bodies inhabits the tumultuous emotional life of this enigmatic and fascinating woman as only fiction can. In the vein of Dawn Tripp's Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keefe and Lauren Groff's Matrix, Devon Jersild's psychologically rich narrative follows Marie from her girlhood in Poland to her dangerous work on the battlefields of World War I, focusing particularly on the period from 1894 to 1912: her marriage, widowhood, and passionate love affair with fellow scientist Paul Langevin, after which she was brutally ostracized from both society and the scientific community. It conveys the excitement of scientific pursuit and reveals the significance of Marie's relationship with Hertha Ayrton, the scientist and suffragist who rescued her from the brink of suicide.

In the popular imagination, Marie Curie possessed not just brilliance but unshakeable drive and self-confidence. Luminous Bodies delves beneath the persona, allowing us to look deeply into the life of a woman who suffered from childhood losses, the premature death of her husband, and a pitiless patriarchy that allowed her to flourish up to a point but turned on her whenever she strayed too far from a woman's place. More than once, she lost faith in herself. How did she succeed despite self-doubt, depressions, and even breakdown? What allowed her to live a rich emotional, sexual, and intellectual life, in spite of everything she went through? And what were the costs? These are the questions that Jersild explores in this unique and intimate novel, in which she weaves a portrait of a multi-dimensional genius whose struggles and triumphs have much to say to women and men today.