In November 1911, Marie Curie was effectively canceled. A French newspaper published the groundbreaking physicist’s private correspondence with colleague Paul Langevin, a married man with whom she’d been having an affair. Xenophobic caricatures of Curie appeared on front pages. With the scandal at fever pitch, the Swedish Academy begged Curie not to come to Stockholm to accept her second Nobel Prize — the one she’d earned solo, without her late husband — in person.
None of this was mentioned when we learned about the “First Great Woman in STEM” in elementary school. But the lowest moment of Curie’s reputation is the starting point of Luminous Bodies: A Novel of Marie Curie, a historical novel by Weybridge resident Devon Jersild that delves into the scientist’s life of the mind and the body.
To follow an elite calling in an era when few women even held professorships, Curie minimized her femininity and emphasized her intellect. “In science, the mind really has no sex,” she asserts in the novel. But the pioneer who discovered radium and radioactivity was also a wife, a daughter, a mother and a lover. Debut novelist Jersild, a psychotherapist and winner of the O. Henry Award for her short fiction, brings all those aspects of Curie alive for the reader. Through her subject, she offers a vibrant portrait of the conflicts facing women in the public eye that still resonates today.
The story opens in 1912, as Marie finds refuge on the English coast with her friend Hertha Ayrton, a fellow scientist and suffragette. Public harassment has taken a toll on Marie’s mental and physical health, and she dreads returning to her university post in Paris. At a crossroads, she travels back in memory to her first meeting with Langevin — her beloved husband’s protégé — and from there to the rest of her unlikely journey.
Jersild narrates this lively story in Marie’s brisk, no-nonsense first person with painterly touches of lyricism. The daughter of a progressive schoolmaster, raised in Poland under repressive Russian rule, young Marie Sklodowska absorbs the credo that “only knowledge could free us,” Jersild writes. “Not violence, not grand speeches, just the slow stubborn work of the mind.”
But if she craves knowledge, this motherless girl also craves love. Marie nearly marries her first boyfriend before following her original plan of seeking higher education in Paris. There, she finds satisfaction for both needs in her scientific mentor, Pierre Curie, who becomes her husband in 1895.
Shortly after the birth of her first daughter, Marie begins the dissertation research that will lead to the discovery of radium. Her work soon absorbs Pierre as well, and in 1903, they receive a joint Nobel. But grief also shapes Marie’s life — a miscarriage, followed by Pierre’s 1906 death in a road accident.
Jersild writes movingly of Marie’s love for her gentle, egalitarian husband; her prolonged mourning; and her eventual struggle with her dawning feelings for Paul, who begins as her steadfast friend and collaborator. Even more illustrative of the author’s nuanced approach is her depiction of Marie’s troubled relationship with Jeannette, Paul’s wife, who could easily have been a stereotypical foil.
Rather than viewing this more traditional woman with suspicion, Marie initially approaches Jeannette as she does the rest of the world, with empathy and curiosity. “I liked the pulse of her femininity, which was a calling for her, and the spell she cast with her flattering attention,” Jersild writes. But the “blissful calamity” of Marie’s feelings for Paul puts the two women on a collision course, and Jeannette will eventually hound her and paint her as a harlot in the press. Only later does Marie begin to peel the toxic onion that is Paul and Jeannette’s marriage and to grasp her lover’s culpability along with her own.
Writing about science and scientists tempts even the best of novelists to deploy potentially facile metaphors — love decaying like radioactive matter, destiny as elusive quantum particles — and Jersild doesn’t eschew these. When Marie describes feeling known and loved by Pierre, she calls the sensation “as potent as radium, and as miraculous.” But the author makes these flights of fancy sound convincing in Marie’s voice, and she doesn’t neglect to give us solid and straightforward explanations of her day-to-day lab work.
Some of the imaginative connections Jersild draws have a subversive potency. Recalling her “early days of starting out as a mother and a scientist,” Marie notes that women like her are often considered “anti-natural” and “doubly disqualified” from scientific work by the demands of motherhood. However, as she talks with Hertha, “we begin to wonder if this is the whole story. If some of what we have achieved is not in spite of, but because of, being mothers.”
In the memorable passage that follows (see sidebar on page 40), Marie compares the experience of giving birth to that of scientific discovery, daring to revel in her life as a luminous body rather than downplay it in favor of a sexless notion of genius. It’s a bold statement, even now.
Perhaps the real Marie Curie would have been more cautious and conservative in her thinking. When she received the 1911 letter asking her to stay home from the Nobel Prize ceremony, she replied that there was “no connection between my scientific work and the facts of my private life” — a necessary position for a woman trying to repair her reputation.
Curie braved public disapproval to show up and accept that prize, though. And the subsequent upheaval of World War I helped bury the scandal and vindicate her legacy. Using her discoveries to treat wounded soldiers, she transformed from a fallen icon into the celebrated figure we all know.
With this light-footed yet deeply thoughtful novel, Jersild reminds us that the greatest minds are indivisible from human bodies and foibles — and gives us a surprisingly relevant heroine for today. ➆
From Luminous Bodies
This article appears in February 18 • 2026.
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