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Giroud’s biography also delves into a love affair between Marie and the son of her employers. To fulfill her end of the deal, she worked as a tutor and a governess with a family in Warsaw. Marie and her sister made an agreement to support each other in their studies. So, she and her sister joined the underground “Flying University” which had been formed to educate Polish youngsters, especially women for whom legal options were sparse. Though she finished school at 15 with a gold medal, she was unable to pursue higher studies in regular institutions because women were forbidden to do so. Perhaps it’s no wonder she was disturbed, as at the young age of 11, Marie lost both her mother and her eldest sister to tuberculosis and typhus respectively. In a revealing biography by Francoise Giraud, Marie is said to have been “ill obsessed with death and apparently frightened at times of the woman within”. Notes and letters written at the time reveal Marie to be a very bright child, though troubled. This put the family in a lot of financial difficulties.

It didn’t help that Marie’s father, being a Polish patriot, found it difficult to hold on to jobs that were often managed by Russian supervisors. In 1867 when Maria Sklodowska was born, Poland was in the middle of political turmoil. In doing this, we remain ignorant of her reality, which was a constant battle with the demons of disease, death, poverty, class, xenophobia and a severely gender-divided society. Marie Curie is today a symbol – a proof of gender equality, of a great scientific partnership and of undying dedication to science. Thanks to this, we’ve all constructed a somewhat sanitised image of the scientist’s legacy. And, of course, we all lament her tragic demise when she failed to recover from a rare deadly disease brought about by exposure to radioactivity. Some of us are aware that Marie was born and brought up in Poland but moved to France when she was 24 and spent the rest of her life there. We all know that along with her husband Pierre, with whom she shared the first prize, Marie introduced and shaped the concept of radioactivity in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

There is one version of Marie Curie’s legacy that we all are familiar with the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win it twice and the only one to win it in two different sciences (Physics and Chemistry).