Marie Curie’s Kitchen

At some point (maybe around 2010 or so), I read Obsessive Genius by Barbara Goldsmith, and it changed my writing life. This was a book not just about Marie Curie’s accomplishments, it was also about how a poor Polish woman became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. There was all the domestic detail a nosy writer could ask for about how she managed her life and her work.

The personal lives of scientists became my new interest. How did one woman become a successful scientist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while another woman became merely a woman who knew more about science than her peers? It was place, education, and encouragement. It was class, ambition, and personality. It was all fascinating.

“Marie Curie’s Kitchen” began its life as an idea. I was in the early twenty-first century still trying to kill the Angel in the House, Virginia Woolf’s specter of domesticity. I had a sink full of dirty dishes and poems to write. What did Marie Curie’s kitchen look like? was my rebellious thought.

The idea became a poem, and then a few years later it became prose. My friend encouraged me to submit a piece to Flashback Fiction, a journal of historical flash fiction. It never occurred to me that I could write fiction. However, a slightly fictional interpretation of real-life events I thought I could manage. Evidently the editors thought so too. Today you can read “Marie Curie’s Kitchen” up at Flashback Fiction.

What’s your favorite personal detail about a historical figure?