Marie curie and her daughters

Claudine Monteil

(Editions Calmann-Levy, 342 pages, 2022)

***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***

Claudine Monteil paints the portrait of these three women with dazzling and complex stories, whose courage, intelligence and commitment have changed the course of History.  

Though the talent of Marie Curie, physicist, chemist, and double Nobel Prize winner in physics and chemistry, marks our spirits, it is also the adventurous lives of her daughters, Irene and Eve that can still inspire us today.

Despite a difficult start with a sick mother in occupied Poland and then studying in Paris with not a penny to her name, she revolutionized medicine and research on radioactivity alongside her husband, Pierre Curie. They were awarded the Nobel Prize to-gether in 1903 and Marie Curie lived a rich life as a scientist, a woman and a mother. Sadly, tragedy strikes in 1906 with the sudden death of Pierre Curie, and she is left a widow. Still this does not hinder the education that she provides for her two daughters which leads each of them to a great destiny.

Irene will follow the scientific path of her mother: from the age of seventeen she is on the battlefields of the Great War to save the wounded using new medical materials. Then, later, alongside her mother, does research at the Radium Institute. In 1935, together with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie, she won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. A committed activist, she took part in the struggle for women's rights and against Nazism, long before the Second World War.

After a successful career as an international pianist, Eve, the youngest daughter, chooses to pursue literature and diplomacy. She wrote the first biography on her mother which received the prestigious National Book Award in 1937. She became one of the first and most important French diplomats in the 1940s and 1950s, meeting thousands of people to persuade the US to join the Allied forces alongside de Gaulle against Hitler.

Claudine Monteil, a retired French diplomat, is the author of ten books, most of which have been translated into many languages including The Beauvoir Sisters, published in the US by Seal Press in 2004. Her mother, Josiane Serre, was a chemist and university professor, and the president of the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles, where Marie Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie taught and trained  the first generations of women scientists in France.