Marie Curie's magical turn

Miramar is the surprise hideaway of the glowing scientist in Tracy Farr's imaginative retelling.

- PAULA MORRIS

In 1912, Marie Curie - the first female professor at the University of Paris, first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize, and first person to be awarded two Nobels - decided to disappear for awhile. She was one of the most famous women in the world; her public image was of someone selflessly devoted to science, her students, her daughters and the work of her late husband and scientific collaborator Pierre, who was run over on a wet Paris street in 1906.

But she also had detractors, including a right-wing press that lobbied against her election to the French Academy of Sciences - she was Jewish, they lied, and therefore not really French - and, late in 1911, broke the salacious news of Curie's sexual relationship with physicist Paul Langevin. Langevin had been one of Pierre Curie's PhD students; he was separated from his wife but not yet divorced.

Curie was also unwell, suffering from a kidney ailment that needed surgery and months of recuperation. The historical record tells us she spent most of 1912 lying low, first in France, then in England, before she was well enough to return to her lab.

Wonderland, Tracy Farr's lyrical, imaginative new novel, conjures up an alternative history. Madame Curie's friend Ernest Rutherford ("the Great Man of Science") suggests recovery in his distant homeland, in the home of an old school friend, Dr Matilda (Matti) Loverock. So the famous lady escapes to another hemisphere, another world. By ferry she arrives in Miramar, a quiet peninsula southeast of Wellington, near the road to Worser Bay. "In the autumn sun," we're told, "she almost seems to glow."