Barbara Ludman
MRS EINSTEIN by Anna McGrail (Anchor)
A daughter was born to Mileva Maric and fellow student Albert Einstein a year before they were married. Baby Lieserl was given up for adoption in her mother’s village in southern Hungary so that the great man’s studies would not be disturbed. The two sons born after the marriage were presumably quieter; they were allowed to stay.
Maric soon lost track of her daughter; it was assumed Lieserl died in a scarlet fever epidemic. But suppose she survived, inheriting – along with the Einstein brain – a deep sense of resentment at her abandonment?
Suppose she set out to outdo her father – to teach herself mathematics and physics, to arrive independently at his theories and take them even further? As a woman she would never be honoured, even recognised – but somehow, somewhere, he’d know?
That is the thesis of this rollicking, entertaining novel, and it works brilliantly – when a teenaged Lieserl determines that light is sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle, or a twenty-something Lieserl applies her father’s (and her) theories of the universe to the construction of a German atomic bomb. (It evens out – she pops up at Los Alamos as well in time to save the Manhattan Project.)
Lieserl teams up early on with an enterprising German teacher who never grows older – although eventually she grows younger, on her own space-time continuum. The two reflect history and change it in one of the better reads of the year.