This is the biography of Madame Marie Curie, discoverer of radium, twice winner of the Nobel Prize, the greatest of all women scientists, whose work changed the course of the world's thinking as that of another great woman, Joan of Arc, changed its history.

It is written by her youngest daughter, from long research among records published and unpublished, and from personal remembrance. It is the first full-length biography of Madame Curie, and it is likely never to be displaced as the definitive one. 

The story that it tells is almost too strange to be true. It is that of a little Polish girl, daughter of an impoverished and patriotic professor in a Poland still in the iron clutch of Russia; forced to earn a living as a governess in country houses on the Polish steppes while her elder sister studied in Paris on the combined meagre funds of the family, able finally to reach Paris herself when the sister married, starving in stone garrets, often on the verge of collapse, beautiful, poor and burning with unappeasable ambition. At last she met Pierre Curie, married him and went on to her first achievements in science, still largely ignored by the world. A street accident killed Pierre, and with her two children she carried her work forward alone. The note of triumph deepens; a new science, a new concept of the physical world was growing beneath her slender hands. Because of her the armament of medicine was to gain a tremendous new weapon, and man's knowledge was able to reach out toward strange new frontiers.

The power and the glory came at last, but she did not want them; the honors pouring in on her frail head counted less with her than her notebooks, her test-tubes, the bare laboratory walls. To her death it was science and mankind she cared for, not fame. Inspiring and deeply moving, written with sincerity and distinction, MADAME CURIE is a true classic of biography.

From the dust jacket