Like Nelson or Napoleon – or Marilyn Monroe for that matter – Marie Curie is a perennial subject for biography, a mainstay of the genre. Each new biographer celebrates or purports to penetrate the myth that envelops Madame Curie, manifesting what Leo Braudy has called in his book about the history of fame the “frenzy of renown.”

In Curie’s case, she was especially fortunate to have a daughter, Eve, who understood that the first full biography would establish a legend that subsequent biographers – no matter how well informed – would find impossible to destroy. When Curie biographer Susan Quinn interviewed Eve in 1988 and asked her why Eve had written a life of her mother only three years after Madame Curie’s death, Eve replied that she was “afraid that someone else would do it first and not get it right.”

To Eve, getting it right meant much more than establishing the historical record: “The life of Marie Curie contains prodigies in such number that one would like to tell her story like a legend,” writes Eve in her first sentence. The complete Curie paradigm is related in Eve’s ecstatic prose, a fairy tale that has inspired generations of women – from writer Susan Sontag, who built a backyard laboratory after reading Eve’s book, to Barbara Goldsmith, who watched the 1943 film based on Eve’s biography:

I will never forget the scene in the dark of night, when Marie [Greer Garson] and Pierre [Walter Pidgeon] enter the laboratory to see a tiny luminous stain congealed in a dish. “Oh Pierre! Could it be?” exclaims Marie, as tears roll down her cheeks. Yes, this was it – Radium!

In her new book (W.W. Norton, 320 pages, $23.95), Ms. Goldsmith calls Marie’s story the “romance of radium” – an apt expression not only because of the way husband and wife fused the worlds of home and work in their pursuit of this element, melding male and female roles, but because radium itself became a panacea, heralded not only as a miracle cure for cancer but as an invigorating ingredient in cosmetics that promised to brighten the lives of millions.

This magnificent scientific discovery resulted in two Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry and provides a marvelous backdrop for Marie’s own stirring story of emigration. She spent many years of poverty and solitude in the backwater of Poland, a country that had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, a nation whose name had been effaced from the maps of Europe. She was fired with a desire to “adore something very high and very great.” Eve asks: “How is one to imagine the fervor of this girl of seventeen?” Marie became involved in Polish nationalism, desiring to free her country from Russian occupation and build a better, more just society.

Women students were not admitted to Warsaw University, and so Marie dreamed of an education in France, the seat of learning and liberty. She wrote to her sister Bronya – the sister whom Marie supported by working, Jane Eyre-fashion, as a governess – who was studying medicine in Paris: “I dreamed of Paris as of redemption.”

Marie’s opportunity came in 1891. Eve observes: “How young one felt in Paris, how powerful, trembling, and swelling with hope!” In Paris, Marie studied to a state of near exhaustion, living in Spartan quarters, guided by her “will of iron.” The rest really is history.

Up to this point Ms. Goldsmith has little to add to Eve’s brilliant and essentially true fairy tale. Ms. Goldsmith’s succinct and well-told biography comes into its own after Marie becomes a wife and mother. Ms. Goldsmith draws on the entire Curie archive – a privilege she had to secure by much diligent effort and which she lords over previous biographers. A more nuanced Curie does emerge, one who struggled with a “heavy workload coupled with child care,” a major problem “ignored or glossed over in many Curie biographies,” Ms. Goldsmith emphasizes.

An inveterate reader of Curie biographies – I’m writing one for children myself – I was delighted to see how Ms. Goldsmith describes her subject’s dexterity. Interviewing Marie’s granddaughter, the biographer learns that Madame Curie was “among the few scientists who could blow glass to such precise thickness that her tubes never shattered under heat and pressure.” Today, when scientists work in great teams, it is important to remember that Curie had to do much of her work alone – not merely because the French government shamelessly under funded her, but also because no one else could handle the instrumentation as precisely as Marie. Here is a passage that captures the strenuous intricacy of Madame Curie’s science, which was, in effect, an art:

With rare persistence and skill Marie sat, day after day, in front of her equipment. She moved only when her back hurt. Her process is even tedious to describe: Near her right hand was a piezoelectric quartz that had been stretched and weighted down by a series of small weights. After Marie had spread the test substance and charged the electrometer, she fixed her eyes on the spot of light reflected in the mirror. Then Marie lifted the weights, one by one, onto a small scale until the quantity of electric charge registering on the electrometer was identical to the opposing electric charge from the quartz. Jacques Curie [Pierre’s brother] noted that few people were skillful enough to do this since the operator, whose eyes were focused on the spot of light, was forced to lift the weights in an almost automatic way. “The wrist and arm must be extremely flexible.”

I’m only halfway to describing one procedure that even to this day is incomparable. When Ms. Goldsmith asked Curie’s granddaughter for a demonstration of Marie’s techniques, she replied: “Impossible! No one at the [Marie Curie] Institute has the sleight-of-hand or the concentration to do it. In fact, I know of no one alive who has this skill.” If Ms. Goldsmith has demystified aspects of Marie Curie’s life and work, she has also created a figure that seems an even more towering force not merely in the history of science but in the annals of biography itself. Long live the legend!