Marie Curie by Paul May

One of the first books I read when I set out to read all the Carnegie Medal winners several years ago was The Radium Woman by Eleanor Doorly. Like, I suspect, most people, I knew roughly who Marie Curie was but didn't know much about her life and work other than that she discovered the element, radium. (She also discovered polonium and named it for her native country.) Marie Curie died in 1934, and Eleanor Doorly's foreword is dated March 1939, so she must have started working on the book with Curie's death a very recent memory. She says:

'The life of Madame Curie has been written by her daughter with a charm and beauty never surpassed. It is therefore with the deepest humility that I have ventured to make out of that lovely book a shorter tale for young people.'

I have just finished reading a short book by the Spanish novelist and journalist, Rosa Montero, called, in Spanish, La ridicula idea de no volver a verte, which means something like, The ridiculous idea of never seeing you again. After Montero's husband died her editor sent her a copy of the diary which Marie Curie wrote after the sudden death of her husband, Pierre. (He fell under the wheels a heavy cart in a Paris street and his skull was crushed.) The editor wanted Montero to write an introduction to the diary, which was only a few pages long, but hoped that reading the diary might prompt Montero to write something more substantial, something to which the diary would become a 'complement' or addition. And that is what happened.

Montero went out and bought as many biographies as she could find.  It turns out that Rosa Montero corresponded with Ursula K Le Guin. What she actually says in her book is: 'I have had the immense good fortune and privilege of developing a certain friendship with Ursula K Le Guin, who is one of the writers whose influence over my work I consciously recognise.' As an aside, I was once talking to Jan Mark about science fiction and mentioned Ursula Le Guin and I can still hear the thrill in her voice when she said 'She's my friend!'

Anyway, Rosa Montero had written to Le Guin that she wanted to write a book about Marie Curie, and part of Le Guin's reply was as follows:

'I read a biography of Marie Curie when I was about 16 or 17 . . .  Perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me but what I remember is that, after Pierre died in the street, she kept a piece of cloth with which she had tried to clean his face. Some of his blood and his brains had remained on the fabric and she kept it, hiding it from everyone, until she had to burn it. That image has haunted me anxiously all these years.'

Rosa Montero had read Marie Curie's diary but had assumed that when she referred to burning Pierre's clothes and 'kissing what was left of him' she was doing so immediately after his death and was kissing 'metaphorically'. Then she managed to get hold of a copy of Eve Curie's 'lovely book' and discovered that it was two months later that these events took place. I found myself wondering what Eleanor Doorly had made of this in her book. Unsurprisingly, she left it out.  Pierre's death and its aftermath is treated like this:

When Eve grew up, she told us, in the lovely life she wrote of her mother, that from the moment she spoke the words 'Pierre est mort,' a cloak of solitude and secrecy enveloped Marie, and that from that April day for ever she was a person apart and lonely.

Eve is being a little melodramatic here. There are very many ways in which Marie was engaged with other people. For example, here she is at the inaugural Solvey Congress which ended coincidentally on 3rd November 1911. This was where she first met Albert Einstein, who is standing behind her and was a friend for the rest of her life. Einstein stands between her lover, the physicist Paul Langevin (furthest right) and Ernest Rutherford. Also omitted from Eleanor Doorly's book is any mention of Marie's and Paul's affaire. On their return to Paris after the conference, a massive scandal broke out as the press revealed details of Marie's correspondence with Paul, portraying her as a scarlet woman, a foreigner, a jew and an imposter. That same year she won her second Nobel prize. As Eve Curie pointed out bitterly :

Each time Marie Curie was acclaimed for her talent in other countries, when they praised her with previously unheard-of elegies, then immediately she became for the same newspapers and beneath the bylines of the same journalists, the 'ambassador of France,' 'the pure representation of the genius of our race' and 'a national glory.'

Here's how Eleanor Doorly dealt with the scandal:

'But unfortunately there is a strange disease which causes certain people to feel very cruel when they hear of someone being very successful or very beautiful. Marie was both, and suddenly people began to write her anonymous letters and to tell extraordinary lies about her and to accuse her of doing wrong things of which she had never dreamed . . .'

Certainly, there is no danger of a child reading The Radium Woman and being haunted like Ursula Le Guin for the rest of their lives by a gruesome detail. They might, however, be envious of the education Marie's children received. For a brief space of time Marie and her friends engaged in an exercise in home-schooling, or rather, in a kind of shared tutoring ;

'... they decided to pool their children and teach them for themselves. The lucky children were to have one lesson a day, but it was to be given by the best specialist in Paris.' Who knows whether all those eminent scientists and artists were great teachers. The experiment didn't last:

'Unfortunately, however, parents have to be busy earning the family income and have no time to give their own children enchanting lessons.'

But this paragraph concludes with a sentence that I suspect was dear to Eleanor Doorly's heart. (She was a headmistress.)

'(The children) said in after-life that from those early lessons they learnt to like work, to be indifferent to money, and to be so independent that they were convinced that they could pull themselves out of any difficulty.'

Eleanor Doorly was an interesting woman. To some extent she was a woman of mystery, said by some (apparently, . . . maybe . . . ) to have served in the Special Operations Executive during WW2 and reputed to have spoken 7 languages. She was headmistress of the King's High School for Girls in Warwick from 1922 to 1944, but before that was Headmistress for nearly 7 years of the Twickenham County School for Girls, a tenure which ended in controversy after an encounter with a representative of the Girl Guides Association. You can read an excellent account of these events by Tom Barney on the Archives for London website, but, in short, Miss A Fradelle-Pratt, District Secretary of the Girl Guides for Twickenham requested of Miss Doorly that the Guides should be allowed to start a company in her school. Miss Doorly enquired about the Guide Promises. She had no problem with Honouring God and the King, or with Helping Others, but when it came to the Guide Law she was not happy. After this meeting, Miss Fradelle Pratt informed the Governors that, on being told that "A Guide follows orders" Miss Doorly "Made the very greatest objection to the teaching of obedience & said she did not permit of it being taught in the school – & therefore with her objection also of a uniform the idea of the Girl Guide Company could not be thought of."  

This is a wonderful scene. I suspect that the intelligent and extremely capable Miss Doorly allowed her disdain for Miss Fradelle-Pratt, and her dislike of militarism, to show through. This was, after all, just a few short years after the end of the war. 'Following orders' is not the same thing as 'being obedient' or, as we are more likely to say today, 'well-behaved'. How, in any case, would you 'teach obedience'? There's plenty of evidence that the girls in Miss Doorly's school were very well behaved, but Miss Doorly clearly did not suffer fools. The controversy cost her her job, but she appears to have found little difficulty in obtaining a new position.

I like to imagine a meeting between her and Madame Curie. I feel sure they would have had much in common.

The Twickenham controversy on Archives for London.