Sex and Lies Before Videotape : Writing and rewriting women’s lives : MARIE CURIE: A Life, <i> By Susan Quinn (Simon & Schuster: $30; 509 pp.)</i>

There is a phase in every girl’s life when, yearning to live heroically, she immerses herself in biographies of great men and women. Eve Curie’s book about her mother, “Madame Curie,” is one of the classics of this genre.

Marie Sklodowska Curie was born in Poland, a country divided between Austria, Germany and Russia. The Sklodowski family, intellectuals and patriots, lived in the Russian Partition, where repression of Polish culture was especially severe. Everything Polish was forbidden: inspectors monitored schools, for example, to make sure that all lessons were conducted in Russian. But there were schools, including Marie’s, where the students led a double life. All the students knew that home economics on the official schedule meant Polish history in real life, that German language class should be read sometimes as Botany class, and so on. The girls and their teachers were on constant alert for unannounced inspections. Little rebellions kept the patriotic spirit high: On her way to school every day, Marie passed a Russian monument to the defeat of an earlier Polish uprising, and every day she took care to spit on it.

Life at home had its troubles as well. When Marie was 8 a beloved elder sister died of tuberculosis; two years later her mother succumbed to the same disease. Around the same time her father lost his job teaching at a state school and turned the family home into a boarding school. Marie’s schooling was cut short by the need to make a living, which she did as a governess. She was, however, a governess with a plan. She would use her salary to send her older sister, Bronia, to Paris and put her though the Sorbonne. Once Bronia was established, it would be Marie’s turn to attend university. The plan worked. After four years of isolation from her friends, of attending to difficult families and of following an ambitious program of self-instruction, she was finally called to Paris.

Within two years of arriving in France, Marie Sklodowska received her license es sciences with the highest marks of her class. The following year she placed second in the exam for the license es mathematiques. And exactly one year after that she married Pierre Curie, whose idealism and dedication to science were the equal of hers. Eve Curie describes the hardship of her parents’ early years, their discovery of radium in 1898, and Marie’s subsequent struggle to obtain a sample of it. The story of her four years of toil, by turns back-breaking and painstaking, which finally resulted in the extraction of one-tenth of a gram of radium from one ton of uranium mine waste, is one of the epics of science.

Marie’s beloved husband and partner died in a gruesome accident at the age of 46. She carried on for another 28 years. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, the first person to do so. She was also the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. She created the Institutes of Radium in Paris and Warsaw. She conceived of and created a radiology service for the military during the first World War and took it to the front lines, over the objections of top officials. At 67, the year of her death--a death caused by her work with radium--she was still working in her laboratory and taking vigorous hikes in the mountains.

Eve emphasizes her parents’ unworldliness, the idealism that made them refuse to patent the process they developed of isolating radium, a process that could have made them wealthy. She tells of their distaste for the politicking that even then was necessary for advancement in the scientific Establishment. And she describes the shabby treatment they received at the hands of that Establishment, especially the Academy of Sciences, which refused membership to both Curies, even after they had been awarded the Nobel Prize. Eve makes it clear that despite all the honors that were accorded Marie Curie, there remained a strong prejudice against her within the French establishment. This part of her story left me confused. Judging by Eve’s bitterness about it, her mother was subject to a degree of ill-treatment too great to be attributed to mere misogyny.

In her new biography, “Marie Curie: A Life,” Susan Quinn explains this mystery. Quinn portrays a woman who is more complex, more interesting, and who has more to teach us than does Eve’s compelling, but not so real, saint of the laboratory. Eve’s biography was largely provoked by--though it does not mention--a scandal that resulted in the fighting of five duels and that ruined her mother’s health. Some years after Pierre’s death, Marie had an affair with a long-time colleague, Paul Langevin. His wife obtained several of their love letters and her brother, the editor of a right-wing newspaper, helped publish them.

Unfortunately for Marie, the discovery of her affair came shortly after the press had turned against her for being “unfeminine” in allowing herself to be put forward for membership in the all-male Academy of Sciences. As Quinn says, most of the French press saw the candidacy as a symbol, or as a symptom, of the whole direction of the nation--and it was a direction they did not like. The attacks on Marie Curie, which Quinn has diligently ferreted out, are appalling, but it takes a stronger woman than I am not to enjoy passages such as novelist Marie Louise Antoinette Regnier’s appeal to women to keep their “intellectual gifts private, a charm which belongs to you, like very beautiful eyes, a supple body and a great head of hair.”

And now Madame Curie was trying to destroy the French family. The right-wing press decided that she was to stand for everything they disliked and feared. She was a foreigner, a libertine, a rationalist--and as such a threat to nationhood, to the family and to God. It is now clear, declared one paper, that “France [is] in the grip of dirty foreigners, who pillage it, soil it, and dishonor it.” Marie Curie is a foreign woman, an intellectual, emancipated, while Mme. Langevin--who comes out of this book as most unpleasant and possibly insane--is “a French mother, who . . . wants only to keep her children.”

Marie Curie’s first brush with the press had not been so brutal. In 1903, when she and her husband, along with Henri Becquerel, received the Nobel Prize for their discovery of radioactivity, she was an ornament to the nation. “It is true,” admitted les Dimanches, “that she was born Polish, but she is French by adoption. She . . . has acquired a doctorate in physics here and has worked as professor at the Normal School at Sevres. So let’s not quibble about nationality. Of course her role in the great discovery had been that of a muse: Pierre soon discovered that he could not do without her. . . . She fanned the sacred fire in him whenever she saw it dying out.”

Though the press could only conceive of Marie Curie as a faithful helpmate, or a rapacious, unnatural woman, she was in fact a great scientist with all the interests and cares of a normal woman. A month after discovering radium, she carefully notes having made 14 pots of gooseberry jelly. Her letters show her very close and affectionate relationships with her father, brother and sisters, her daughters, and many friends. Scientists though they are, she and her friends are expressive in a way that is uncommon today. Einstein, whose judgments were not always charitable, wrote to her: “I feel the need to tell you how much I have come to admire your spirit, your energy and your honesty. . . . I will always be grateful that we have among us people like you.”

The titles of the two biographies are ironic and revealing. “Madame Curie,” the story written by her daughter, is biography as official statement, stirring but incomplete. “Marie Curie: A Life,” written by someone she never met, is a biography of the whole person. Marie Curie was more deeply wronged than perhaps her daughter knew, but she also fought more successfully against the prejudice she encountered than Eve admitted. She did not allow herself to be written out of the history of radioactivity, as some of her colleagues wished. She did not, as Eve implies, die in poverty dishonored by her adopted country, but in possession of a substantial state pension and as the owner of three homes. And, as Quinn makes clear, she did not live the life of a self-sacrificing saint, but a much more complex one that required her to balance family, friends, work and love and to fight off those that disapprove of such balancing acts. This is a life that many women today--even those who are not candidates for the Nobel Prize--will recognize.