Mrs. Einstein: A Novel [Hardcover]

Anna McGrail (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 1998

A novel of breathtaking audacity that imagines the fierce quest for revenge undertaken by Albert Einstein's real-life abandoned daughter.

The facts are these: When Albert Einstein was a young man, his wife-to-be gave birth to a daughter, Lieserl, whom they soon gave up for adoption to a Hungarian woman. Beyond that, Lieserl Einstein is lost to history.

But not to literature. Anna McGrail has imagined an amazing yet plausible life for this indomitable woman, one that spans the scientific history of the modern world from the theory of relativity to the atomic bomb and that moves from the plains of rural Hungary to the death camps of Germany to the laboratory at Los Alamos where the entire world was put under threat of annihilation. It is Lieserl's sole burning desire to learn physics, to beat her father at his own game, to teach him that his actions—whether giving away a daughter or unlocking the secrets of the universe—have consequences that cannot be denied. In that she will succeed—but at what cost to herself and to the world?

An extraordinary tour de force of the literary imagination, written with utter confidence and panache. A novel certain to be widely reviewed, debated, and read. This breathtaking book will appeal to readers of works as diverse as Sophie's World and Jane Mendelssohn's I Was Amelia Earhart.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In January 1902 Albert Einstein's future wife Mileva Maric, a fellow student at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, gave birth to a baby girl in her hometown of Novi Sad in southern Hungary. The pregnancy was kept a secret from the couple's closest friends, and little Lieserl was given up for adoption. Einstein and Mileva eventually married in 1903 and produced two sons. They divorced in 1918 and Einstein married his cousin Elsa. Nothing more is known about Einstein's daughter, whose very existence remained a jealously guarded secret until 1986.

In Mrs. Einstein, Anna McGrail imagines what might have become of Lieserl. The discarded daughter grows up with an astonishing mind and an abiding hatred for her father. Given her extraordinary mathematical ability--an ability she insists she has inherited from her mother--she resolves to haunt her father's scientific career and sets herself to master cutting-edge physics, the science of gravity and light. She will match each of Einstein's mathematical proofs with one of her own that goes beyond its conclusions or undermines its findings.

Repeatedly thwarted by her material disadvantages and her restricted access to the current scientific journals, she eventually hits on an uglier plan. She will use Einstein's own great equation, e = mc2 , to engineer a nuclear bomb. This ultimate weapon of mass destruction will be based on the scientific theories of the world-famous pacifist, and Einstein himself will be forced to recognize this fact by the daughter he resolutely refused to acknowledge. At this point McGrail returns us for a brief moment from fiction to history: Lieserl's crucial discovery of the splitting of a uranium atom was indeed made by a woman scientist, Lise Meitner, in 1938.

Lieserl's obsession with her father takes her on a picaresque journey across Europe and on to America, accompanied by her larger-than-life friend and protector, the German teacher Maja. They survive a sequence of bizarre adventures that range from the absurdly comical to the tragic. McGrail's fictional tale is sharply written, with enough mathematical detail woven in to make her Lieserl thoroughly convincing. Maja, an ingenious counterbalance for her single-minded heroine, is a bizarrely effective manipulator of the two women's fortunes. Her ageless, chameleon beauty is magically modified to seduce any who stand in their way, improbably opening doors for them wherever they go.

This is an entertaining, readable novel in which magic realism contrives a quirky kind of verisimilitude for a plot that is ultimately driven by the intricate twists and turns of 20th-century science. There is a gentle irony in McGrail's championing of a forgotten daughter and her ill-treated mother that keeps the reader amused and attentive, and is never solemnly insistent. --Lisa Jardine

From Publishers Weekly

The imagined life of a woman hidden by history is the interesting, if not entirely successful, premise of this second novel by the British author of Blood Sisters. In January 1897, Albert Einstein met and fell in love with Mileva Maric, a fellow student at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. In 1902, Maric gave birth in her Hungarian hometown of Novi Sad to a baby girl, Lieserl. The couple, who eventually married, kept the child's birth a secret, and it is presumed they gave her up for adoption (her very existence was unknown until Einstein's secretary died in 1986). McGrail, however, has created an extraordinary, if far-fetched, life story for her protagonist: Lieserl grows up in rural Hungary, consumed with hatred for her father and obsessed with exacting revenge for her rejection. With an extraordinary mathematical ability, she sets out to master cutting-edge physics. Her goal, initially, is to beat Einstein to each of his mathematical proofs. Eventually, though, her plan turns nastier: to use the theory of relativity developed by her pacifist father to engineer a nuclear bomb. McGrail, a compelling storyteller, recounts Lieserl's dramatic journey?her flight from occupied Hungary to Vienna, marriage to a Jewish businessman, the birth of her own two children, her struggle to become a respected physicist, complicity with the Nazis, loss of her family to the death camps, a move to America to work on the Manhattan Project and eventual confrontation with her father?with clear and focused prose. McGrail presents a great deal of daunting scientific material in a manner that makes it both accessible and exciting, but the life she imagines for Lieserl is both completely implausible (how is it that a poorly educated farm girl can challenge the greatest physicist of our time?) and annoying in its lack of reflection (especially after Lieserl loses her husband and children to the Nazis yet still remains obsessed with punishing a father she has never met). Ultimately, the blind obsession with revenge that animates this novel also brings it down.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First American Edition edition (June 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393046117
• ISBN-13: 978-0393046113
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,698,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I must have been in just the right mood., January 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Mrs. Einstein: A Novel (Hardcover)

I just finished this excellent little book. I've read the other reviews in this section and count myself fortunate for not taking the book too seriously. Perhaps that is why I so thoroughly enjoyed it. The author has created a marvelous central character in Lieserl. She is exquisitely drawn, the matrix of her emotions and motivations crystal clear without being tedious. There are two stories running in tandem here; the apocryphal story of Einstein's daughter and her integral involvement in the development of the atom bomb, and the story of this extraordinary woman's personal development through soul-numbing deprivation and loss. And it's funny. The "science" of the first story is beautifully foiled by the spirituality of the second. Sure we've seen this story before, though not lately, and as far as I know NEVER with a woman as the central character. I do not hesitate to recommend this book with the following caveat; if you take it too seriously you may throw it down in disgust within the first 50 pages. I have a feeling the author would agree.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Important addition to literature of WWII, September 16, 1998

By 

Barbara Klein (Basalt, Colorado USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mrs. Einstein: A Novel (Hardcover)

This novel joins Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient" in raising important questions about the development of nuclear weapons and the decision made to use them at the conclusion of World War II. It is time for our literature to begin examining these issues. We have countless fictional works based on the holocaust in Germany, and certainly, we need these works. We need to understand what happened, and how it could have happened. Too often, however, American and British authors find the answer all too easily. They simply create a fictional universe in which the German people share a passion for sadism carried to extremes and an average IQ of about 50. So much of this literature becomes formulaic, and finally, silly. You do not have to scratch "Winds of War" too deeply to discover Colonel Clink. Meanwhile, we have our own unpardonable act, which we have not until recently brought into critical focus. Ondaatje lulls his readers' attention away from the horrors of war in the charmed atmosphere of the abandoned hospital where the English patient lays. This idyll shatters suddenly with the sapper's undeniable utterance. "You would not have dropped this weapon on a white people." McGrail's novel moves in a similar way. Einstein's abandoned, illegitimate daughter Lieserl slowly ceases to be a human character, and becomes instead that aspect of human intellect that made the bomb possible. She is the mathematics. She has no morals, no religion, no values. She is not impeded by national boundaries or physical limitations. She is a force, supposedly driven by revenge, but that motive cannot be examined too closely. In fact, Lieserl does not work as a character with human motivations, and limitations. The reader has to accept her as a type of abstraction or the story becomes entirely implausible. This woman can change her identity and nationality by the simple act of changing her name. She and her companion sail across boundaries and easily assimilate into the most closed communities. In the context of the American project to create the bomb, Lieserl becomes the cloud that obscures the light of ethical considerations from the teams of scientists working on the project. She is the abstract knowledge, blameless yet responsible. After the unthinkable occurs, however, Lieserl has a moment of self-awareness. She suddenly realizes that once they had the bomb, the politicians, ignorant of its actual power, incapable of understanding anything close to its destructiveness, would certainly use it, and use it proudly. The novel brings home the fact that some of those working on the project knew exactly what they were unleashing on the world. We need to ask ourselves, "What can they have been thinking? Why did they pursue this unwelcome knowledge? Did they really imagine that the politicians would refrain from using it?" Once the moment of revelation is past, however, the novel does not hold together. McGrail tries to return her character to the mundane considerations of domestic life, and she really cannot do that. Lieserl's has to remain figurative in order to be believable. This is really a minor problem, however. The development of this interesting figure for a mysterious aspect of the human intellect rewards the reader amply.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's Certainly Different, June 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Mrs. Einstein: A Novel (Hardcover)

If you're in the right mood for it, this story will just pick you up and carry you along. It covers a whole century, several continents, an ever-changing cast of characters, and all takes place just at the edges of major historical events. It will give you a different view of the breakthroughs in physics over the past one hundred years, and also give you an idea of what it must be like to live a life in the grips of an obsession.

I've never read anything that gives such an odd revisionist take on history written so well before - and the writing will certainly engage you.