[4] The Radium Woman was based on Ève Curie's biography of her mother, which had been simultaneously published in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, the United States and other countries in 1937.

The book begins with the five-year-old Manya Sklodovski in her family home in Warsaw, already aware of the power of the Russian officials, and later describes the ten-year-old schoolgirl's experience of secretly learning forbidden Polish history with her class.

Other chapters concern the fourteen-year-old Manya learning that a friend's brother is to be executed as a rebel, and her year's holiday after finishing High School at sixteen, time spent in the country and the mountains.

The biography continues through the early difficult days of making a living by teaching, supporting her sister who was studying medicine in Paris, starting an illegal Polish school for peasant children in the country, and an unhappy love affair.

"[5] Her meeting with Pierre Curie which led to marriage and the flowering of her career, and the great discoveries which changed the face of science and earned the Nobel Prize, occupy the central chapters of the book.