The Story of Blanche and Marie
  • Published: 1 November 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099483731
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

The Story of Blanche and Marie

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The moving, passionate and ultimately tragic story of Marie Curie and her discovery of radium.

By the author of The Visit of the Royal Physician, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

In 1878, Blanche Wittman was committed to Salpêtrière Hospital as an hysteric and placed in the care of the famous M. Charcot, who regularly displayed her, in a cataleptic state, before a public audience. Over time, the nature of her participation in these demonstrations changed; she graduated from patient to assistant and on leaving the hospital, was hired by Marie Curie to work in her Paris laboratory.

On 17 February 1898, radium was discovered and Blanche's exposure to it necessitated the amputation of all her limbs, save one. As for Marie, her husband and collaborator Pierre was weakened by illness and subsequently killed having wandered in front of an oncoming horse and cart.

Following this, she embarked on an ill-fated love affair, which, in 1911, almost cost her the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Using Blanche's notebooks - 'The Book of Questions' - Enquist deftly weaves fact and fiction in a powerful tale of scientific discovery, death, art love and the extraordinary relationship of two remarkable women at the dawn of a century of tremendous change.

The Story of Blanche and Marie was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
  • Published: 1 November 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099483731
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

About the author

Per Olov Enquist

Per Olov Enquist is one of Sweden's most acclaimed writers: a novelist, playwright and poet with works published in 26 countries. He is the author of Captain Nemo's Library, The Visit of the Royal Physician (winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Story of Blanche and Marie.

Also by Per Olov Enquist

The Visit Of The Royal Physician
See all

Praise for The Story of Blanche and Marie

He treats these big themes with miniaturist care and attention, while his characters, trapped in history like insects in amber, are deeply and sympathetically observed...The result is exhilarating, elliptical, concise, dense, and richly rewarding

Christopher Hart, Literary Review

Enquist weaves fact and fiction with such skill that his novel sometimes reads like a historical account of true events

Vanessa Curtis, Scotland on Sunday

He is one of the contemporary novel's greatest human investigators

Paul Binding, Independent on Sunday

The glimpsed idea of a wider, more poetic sensibility linking art, death, reading and love

James Urquhart, Mail on Sunday

Enquist brings out the sad sorority of two women who suffered grotesquely for love and work

Brenda Maddox, The Times

Blanche's story is tragic and this part fact/part fiction account of her relationship with Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie is touching and disturbing... thought provoking and original

Big Issue

Dense, perverse and fascinating biographical fiction

Caroline Moore, Sunday Telegraph

Anyone who read Per Olov Enquists dazzling novel...The Visit of the Royal Physician...will not be surprised to hear that he has written another fascinating, highly charged miracle of compression...Fiction rarely gets more interesting than this

John de Falbe, Spectator

Dizzy with associations and questions, full of interest and appetite and the satisfactions of a good mind...often funny

Anne Enright, Guardian
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