The Other Einstein

by Marie Benedict

The Polytechnic was a new sort of college dedicated to producing teachers and professors for various math or scientific disciplines, and it was one of the few universities in Europe to grant women degrees.

I’m on a mission to excavate the most important, fascinating and complex historical women and bring their achievements into the light of the modern day through my books. I keep a long list of women about whom I’d like to write, but I often find it difficult to choose which of the women to focus upon next. Sometimes the nature of a particular woman’s legacy or the timeliness of her struggles will guide me towards her story, and sometimes a specific piece of research will factor into that decision. In the case of THE OTHER EINSTEIN, the information in the above quote played a role in my selection of Mileva Maric Einstein. When I first learned about Mileva’s meteoric rise from 19th century Serbia, where it was illegal for girls to attend high school (except in certain, very proscribed circumstances), to admission into a university program to study physics, I found her story compelling in its own right, not just as a footnote to Albert Einstein’s life. I could envision the sort of resilience, hard work, and brilliance it must have taken to prevail in that sort of environment at that time. But, when I learned how challenging it was for European women to secure a university degree, Mileva’s accomplishments were thrown into bold relief, and I felt even more compelled to tell her tale. I often feel a sense of wonder when I realize the lengths historic women had to go to in order to do their crucial work. That is what propels me to write their stories. Certainly, in my most recent novel, THE MYSTERY OF MRS. CHRISTIE, my astonishment at the enigmatic, real-life disappearance that Agatha Christie suffered through when she was a young mother in 1926 moved me to write her story. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54221749-the-mystery-of-mrs-christie

These friends didn’t take away my resolve to succeed as I’d feared. They made me stronger.

Mileva’s ascent was certainly inspiring to me, but her story also pulled at my heartstrings from the start. Researching and reading about her life, I couldn’t help but think how lonely her youth must have been. She lived in somewhat removed Serbian towns as her family moved for her father’s job, and in each of those locations, she was always very different than the other girls and young women she encountered. She was unusually bright and more motivated than most—even attending an all-male gymnasium, ultimately—and this was compounded by her physical distinctiveness, a significant limp due to a hip condition. I imagined that she must have felt very alone and been the brunt of teasing and ridicule, until she made her first friends at university. And at that moment, she must have been able to picture a life as a professional woman with like-minded friends—for the very first time. How empowering that must have been for Mileva.

I constantly astonished myself with these girls. Astonished that I had the words to express my long-buried stories. Astonished that I allowed them to see who I really was. And astonished that I was accepted regardless.

This passage really flows from the earlier scenes among Mileva and her new university friends and her interior thoughts about engaging in these friendships, her very first. Having spent her life closed off from other girls and young women—really relying on her family unit for companionship and support, emotional and otherwise—it must have been quite a leap for her to open herself up and trust in these female relationships. Wouldn't you have been wary of opening up to them after a lifetime of isolation and even ostracization? But once she landed in their metaphorical embrace, she considered fresh life paths and felt a new world open up for her. Until Albert came along, anyway, and began wreaking havoc!

Sometimes, in the pages of my texts and in the glimmers of my musings, I sensed God’s patterns unfolding in the physical laws of the universe that I was learning. These were the places I felt God, not in the pews of Mama’s churches or in their cemeteries.

I am not a scientist, not by a long stretch, even though I find facets of it fascinating. So, one of the most challenging things about writing as Mileva Maric Einstein was her passion for and knowledge of science, physics in particular. In fact, I almost didn’t write THE OTHER EINSTEIN because of that; I was fearful I couldn’t do Mileva justice. Once I decided I needed to tell her story, I had to wrap my mind not only around the burgeoning science of this time period but also the way Mileva’s love of science influenced the lens through which she saw the world around her — even her spirituality. No mean feat for me. But once I connected this to my own experiences of sensing the divine in certain glimpses of history or specific pieces of artwork, I found it possible to write this passage and, even if just for a moment, see the world as Mileva may have.

We talked about Newton at dinner often. I liked his idea that everything in the universe, from apples to planets, obeyed the same unchanging laws. Not laws made by people, but laws inherent in nature. I thought I might find God in such laws.

I tried to submerge myself in pre-Einstein physics before I started the actual writing of this book, once I’d gained a fairly solid understanding of the path of Mileva’s life and how Albert wove in and out of her existence (sometimes like a steam engine!). I guessed that one of the more basic principles Mileva could have known at a young age was Newton’s Laws of Motion, and, from one of my sons who is an ardent fan of science, I was aware of an experiment that could make those laws accessible and attractive to younger children. So the principles and the experiment itself became part of a flashback that demonstrated, in part, how Mileva became the scientist she was. But the more I thought about those Newtonian principles, the more they seemed to fit the arc of Mileva’s life—she’d been proceeding along on the straight line of her life until Albert impressed his own force upon her path, changing its course—and those principles became the guiding quotes for the three parts of the book, as explained in the Epilogue.

Her quietude was not weakness; it was an ardent watchfulness that would be replaced by a roar when required.

From her earliest years, Mileva was caught between her parents and the different paths they represented for her future: Her mother embodied tradition and the conventional woman’s life, while her father symbolized advancement and the possibility of a higher education and a career. This caused friction throughout her childhood, and alienated her from her mother, as Mileva desperately wanted the life of a scientist. But when Mileva’s dreams were derailed by an illegitimate pregnancy, her exam failure, and Albert’s resistance to marriage, her mother stepped in to protect and support Mileva with a ferocity that I think surprised her, as I described in this quote. She began to know and appreciate her mother in a way she hadn’t before, and understood that her mother—like many women—had to hide her strength within the facade of domesticity. It was an important lesson for Mileva to learn and brought her closer to her mother. I thought of this as one of the few positive outcomes for Mileva when she became pregnant with Lieserl—other than her love of her daughter, of course—and I thought Mileva certainly deserved that.

Because in my honest moments, I found the work of caring for Albert and our home mind-numbing.

Even though Mileva bristled at historical women’s tasks for much of her early adulthood, once circumstances relegated her to the domestic sphere, she only allowed herself to admit her disdain for traditional women’s work in the privacy of her own thoughts. So much depended on her maintaining a pleasant home life with Albert—she couldn’t practice science except through him, after all—that I imagined she couldn’t really allow herself to dwell on how much she loathed the work of cleaning and cooking and mending and tending. Because, if she did, I think she might have exploded at the unfairness of her situation and the selfishness of Albert’s actions, and she would have lost not only her ability to bring Lieserl into a legitimate family home but also her only hope at working as a scientist—with Albert. Wouldn’t you have been burning to rage at Albert in Mileva’s situation? Would you have been able to keep that anger buried within you for as long as Mileva did?

Time was relative to space. Time was not absolute. Not when there is motion.

While, on its face, these statements appear to be a very simplified restatement of part of the theory of special relativity and its impact on Newton’s Principles of Motion, in fact, they represent the coalescence of the most critical event of Mileva’s life and the inspiration for her possible contribution to that theory, from my fictional perspective. Around the time Albert was working on four of the most groundbreaking theories in physics—papers that literally formed the foundation for modern physics—Mileva had raced to her parents’ home because her daughter Lieserl was desperately ill with scarlet fever. We don’t know for certain what happened to poor Lieserl, but we do know that Lieserl didn’t come home with Mileva and she was never referred to again; given how important motherhood became to Mileva and the fact she didn’t bring the child back with her, I cannot imagine that little Lieserl survived that bout of scarlet fever. With all the women I write about, I am curious about what happened in these women’s lives that gave rise to the incredible contribution they’ve made, the legacy that lives on after them—in Mileva’s case, the theory of special relativity, I’d argue. When I learned that the loss of Lieserl happened right around the time the theories were being formed, I started to think about the link between those two events, the manner in which the devastating death of a child affected the physics lens through which Mileva saw the world. As a mother myself, I would would desperately want to turn back time, to reclaim my child’s life, and it was this thought that led to this scene.

“Remember my words, Mileva, when you withdraw into the deadening cycle of home. You and I are not so different except in the choices we’ve made. And remind yourself that a new choice is always possible.”

Marie Curie is such a legendary figure and often the only female historical scientist most of us can name, so when I learned that she and Mileva actually knew each other quite well, I could not resist making the comparison between them. After all, they were alike in so many ways. Both eastern European women with a passion for science, they faced similar challenges, in terms of their genders and their backgrounds, and still rose up to claim a western European university education in the sciences. The primary difference between them, other than the gap in their ages and specialties, was the sort of husbands they’d chosen. In highlighting this, I wanted to emphasize how much of a historical woman’s life was dependent on the support, encouragement, and expectations of her husband, even for brilliant, ambitious women like Mileva and Marie. And I also wanted to suggest the bright, promising future Mileva might have had—one we might have benefited from immensely—if she’d never married or chosen a very different partner.

Finally, though it is dark, I see. I see the clock. The train. And I understand. I need not change any act. For I am the train. I am traveling faster than the speed of light, and the hands of the clock are rolling backward. I see my Lieserl.

This quote comes from the Prologue and Epilogue, ostensibly reflecting Mileva’s final moments, and it operates almost like a question and an answer. While it is written more as an imaginative link between the physics theories upon which Mileva worked, the arc of her life and her final moments rather than a scientific reflection and observation, it is also a broad brush description of how I see my writing and my novels. I almost operate like an archaeologist, sifting through the detritus of the past to find these important women, and I roll backwards through time as I gather and assemble the evidence of their lives to create a cohesive narrative about who they were and what they mean to us in the present, bringing their time forward, if you will. If I do my job right, then I hope readers can see the legacy of these past women reverberating in our modern lives—whether it is Mileva from THE OTHER EINSTEIN or Agatha from THE MYSTERY OF MRS. CHRISTIE or any of the women in between and those to come.

Her story was, in many ways, the story of many intelligent, educated women whose own aspirations were marginalized in favor of their spouses.

This statement, an unfortunate reality, is an abiding theme in many of my books. Because of the historical preconceptions about women and their abilities—as well as the historical reality that marriage was a necessary component of most women’s existence—women often had no ability to utilize their skills or express their interests except through their marriages. And even then, those skills and interests had to take a back seat to their husbands’ work and ambitions, if they were allowed to pursue them at all. So if you are peering into the past and you want to uncover smart, ambitious women—whether or not they had the opportunity to fully effectuate their aspirations—you often need to look at the lives of successful men and noteworthy husbands. I hope my books invite people to look at our past differently, to see the women where they’ve been hiding in plain sight all along.