Curie×Austen

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Marie Curie and Jane Austen, on On the question only the other person at the table could ask honestly.
2. 00:10
   Marie Curieshare moment

   I will begin with what I must know. You wrote under anonymity. Your novels bore no name. How did you endure it—the work taken seriously while you yourself remained hidden?
3. 00:20
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I did not endure it, Madame. I accepted it as the condition of being heard at all. A woman's name on a novel in 1811 was an invitation to dismiss the contents before they were read.
4. 00:31
   Marie Curieshare moment

   But your work was read. It was admired. And still you remained invisible.
5. 00:36
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Invisible, perhaps, but not unheard. The books existed. They were reviewed, discussed, their merits debated. That the author was 'A Lady' rather than Jane Austen mattered less to me than that the sentences remained intact.
6. 00:51
   Marie Curieshare moment

   I cannot accept this. I published under Marie Curie—my own name, earned through marriage, yes, but mine. To have my work attributed to Pierre alone, or to some anonymous 'laboratory,' this would have destroyed me.
7. 01:06
   Jane Austenshare moment

   And yet it was attributed to him, was it not? Before his death, and for some time after. I recall reading that your Nobel was to honor you both, though the initial nomination listed only your husband.
8. 01:20
   Marie Curieshare moment

   You have done your research. Yes. They wished to omit me. It required intervention to add my name.
9. 01:26
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Just so. Then you understand perfectly well what I accepted from the beginning. You fought the same battle, Madame, merely at a different stage of the war.
10. 01:37
    Marie Curieshare moment

    But I fought it. You— forgive me, but you seem to have surrendered before it began.
11. 01:42
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I chose my battlefield. You chose yours. I suspect neither of us surrendered anything of consequence.
12. 01:48
    Marie Curieshare moment

    The consequence was your name. Your identity. How can you say this is nothing?
13. 01:53
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Because the work survived me. Because it was the work that mattered. I wanted readers, Madame, not admirers. The two are not identical.
14. 02:02
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yet you died in obscurity. Your brother wrote that you passed unmarked by the world. This does not trouble you?
15. 02:09
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I died of Addison's disease at forty-one. Obscurity seems a secondary concern. But I take your meaning. No, it does not trouble me. I had no wish to be marked by the world in the manner you suggest.
16. 02:22
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Then I must ask you my true question, the one I came to ask. What did you want?
17. 02:27
    Jane Austenshare moment

    To write well. To be read by those with sense enough to understand what I had done. To earn money sufficient to live without dependence. I achieved two of the three.
18. 02:39
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Which did you not achieve?
19. 02:41
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I suspect you know the answer. Independence came late, and incompletely. But we are wandering from your question. You wished to know how I endured anonymity. May I now ask you mine?
20. 02:54
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Please.
21. 02:54
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You worked with radium for years. You carried it in your pockets, kept it in your desk drawer, held it in your bare hands because it glowed so beautifully in the dark. When did you know it was killing you?
22. 03:05
    Marie Curieshare moment

    This is not— I did not expect this question.
23. 03:08
    Jane Austenshare moment

    No. But it is the question I am suited to ask, because I understand what it is to be consumed by one's work in the most literal sense. You gave your body to the research.
24. 03:21
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I did not know. Not at first. We thought it was harmless, perhaps even beneficial. Pierre and I both suffered from burns, from fatigue, from pains in the fingers, but we attributed this to overwork, to the conditions of the laboratory.
25. 03:36
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And later? When others began to die? When the radium girls in America fell ill?
26. 03:42
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You have done rather more research than I anticipated. Yes. Later I knew. But the work was not complete.
27. 03:50
    Jane Austenshare moment

    So you continued.
28. 03:51
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I continued. What would you have had me do? The element was there. Its properties were not yet understood. During the war, the X-ray machines saved thousands of lives. Was I to stop because my own hands ached?
29. 04:04
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I am not criticizing you, Madame. I am asking when you knew. Because I find it is the knowledge, not the condition itself, that interests me.
30. 04:14
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Perhaps 1920. Perhaps earlier. My eyes were failing. My hearing also. I tired easily. The blood was— there were abnormalities. But one does not simply stop in the middle of the investigation.
31. 04:28
    Jane Austenshare moment

    One could.
32. 04:29
    Marie Curieshare moment

    No. One could not. And you, Miss Austen, you know this. You continued writing through your final illness. Cassandra said you wrote until you could not hold the pen.
33. 04:39
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I was completing Sanditon, yes. But I did not know that continuing would kill me. You did.
34. 04:45
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You knew your body was failing. You knew you were dying. Yet you wrote.
35. 04:49
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I wrote because there was nothing else to do. I could not work in a laboratory or take up nursing. I could only write. But you, Madame—you could have stopped. You could have preserved yourself.
36. 05:02
    Marie Curieshare moment

    For what purpose? To live ten more years in a chair, while others completed the work I had begun? This is not preservation. This is waste.
37. 05:11
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And so we return to my original observation. You wanted credit. Not merely for the work to exist, but for you to be known as its author. For your name to be attached indelibly to the discovery.
38. 05:25
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes. I will not pretend otherwise. I wanted my name on the work because it was my work. Because I had earned it. Is this shameful?
39. 05:33
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Not at all. I merely observe that we wanted different things. You wanted recognition. I wanted the thing itself—the novel, existing in the world, read and understood. The name attached to it was negotiable.
40. 05:46
    Marie Curieshare moment

    But your name was eventually attached. After your death, your family published your identity. So you did not escape recognition, only delayed it.
41. 05:55
    Jane Austenshare moment

    True. Though I suspect Henry saw commercial opportunity more than posthumous justice. My point stands, however. I did not need the recognition while I lived. You did. Why?
42. 06:08
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Because I was a scientist. Science is built on attribution. On credit. On the careful recording of who discovered what, and when. Without my name, the discovery becomes someone else's. It is stolen.
43. 06:21
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Whereas a novel is simply a novel, whoever wrote it.
44. 06:24
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You oversimplify, but yes. The work of literature exists for the reader. The work of science exists for other scientists. It must be traceable. Verifiable. Mine.
45. 06:35
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And yet you nearly lost that credit regardless. After Pierre's death, they wished to give you his pension as his widow, not his collaborator. They treated you as his assistant, not his partner.
46. 06:48
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Which is why I insisted. Why I fought. Why I refused the pension and demanded the Chair at the Sorbonne. Because to accept their charity would have been to accept their version of events.
47. 06:59
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I wonder if we are not so different as we first appeared. I avoided the fight by remaining anonymous. You engaged it directly by insisting on your name. But we both understood that the world would take credit from us if permitted.
48. 07:14
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes. This I grant you. We both understood the theft that would occur. We simply chose different strategies of prevention.
49. 07:21
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And yet your strategy required you to sacrifice your health, your comfort, your very life to the work. Because stopping would have meant allowing others to claim what was yours.
50. 07:33
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You say this as though it were a failing. I cannot see it as such. The work required completion. I was the one to complete it. This is not sacrifice. This is logic.
51. 07:43
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Logic can still kill you, Madame.
52. 07:45
    Marie Curieshare moment

    So can Addison's disease. So can remaining unmarried in a society that offers women few other protections. We both died of the conditions we inhabited.
53. 07:56
    Jane Austenshare moment

    A fair point. Though I did not choose my illness.
54. 08:00
    Marie Curieshare moment

    And I did not choose to be born in an era when women were barred from laboratories and universities and lecture halls. I worked with what was available, including radium that glowed in the dark like a promise.
55. 08:11
    Jane Austenshare moment

    A promise of what?
56. 08:13
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Of something new. Something unprecedented. Something that would justify every difficulty, every indignity, every exclusion. The radium proved I belonged in that laboratory. That I had found something no one else had found. That I was, in fact, a scientist.
57. 08:30
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And if it had not glowed? If it had been a different element, with no luminescence, no beauty?
58. 08:36
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I would have isolated it regardless. The beauty was incidental.
59. 08:40
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I wonder. I think perhaps the beauty mattered more than you admit. I think perhaps you needed the work to be beautiful because it cost so much.
60. 08:49
    Marie Curieshare moment

    And your novels? Are they not beautiful? Do they not justify their cost?
61. 08:53
    Jane Austenshare moment

    They are well-constructed. Whether they are beautiful is for others to determine. But yes, I suppose they justified what they cost—a quiet life, no marriage, no children, no great adventure beyond what I could imagine.
62. 09:09
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You gave up marriage for your work.
63. 09:11
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I had one proposal I might have accepted. I declined it the morning after accepting it, once I had spent a night contemplating what it would mean. Yes, I suppose I chose the work.
64. 09:23
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Then we are the same. We both chose. We both paid. We both refused to apologize for the choice.
65. 09:30
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Perhaps. Though I notice you still have not answered my original question. When did you know the radium was killing you?
66. 09:36
    Marie Curieshare moment

    1920. In the summer. I was in the laboratory alone, and my hands were shaking so badly I could not hold the pipette. I knew then. And I returned the next morning regardless.
67. 09:47
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Thank you. That is what I needed to know.
68. 09:49
    Marie Curieshare moment

    And you? When did you know you were dying?
69. 09:52
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I did not. Not with certainty. I suspected, of course, in the final months. But I had no laboratory, no measurements, no blood tests to confirm it. I simply grew weaker, and then one day I could not rise from bed. It was altogether less scientific than your experience.
70. 10:09
    Marie Curieshare moment

    But you kept writing.
71. 10:11
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Yes. Until I could not. And then I stopped, because the choice was removed from me. You, I think, would have crawled to the laboratory if necessary.
72. 10:21
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I did crawl to the laboratory. Several times. Toward the end.
73. 10:25
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Then we understand each other completely.