Luminous Bodies: A Novel of Marie Curie
"Devon Jersild's beautiful novel is alchemic, bringing Marie Curie--the scientist, the lover, the mother, the immigrant, the Nobel Laureate--to life. This tense, moving, riveting story burns hot: it's historical fiction at its very best."
--Chris Bohjalian, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant and Hour of the Witch
"Devon Jersild's writing vibrates with a unique energy. Her Luminous Bodies shows us how life's difficulties and contradictions can also light us with passionate possibilities."
--Ann Beattie, author of Onlookers and The New Yorker Stories
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 the author's careful research, Luminous Bodies inhabits the tumultuous emotional life of this enigmatic and fascinating woman. 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 Curie's scientific pursuit and reveals the significance of her relationship with Hertha Ayrton, the scientist and suffragist who rescued her from the brink of suicide.
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 a 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.
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