This fourth novel by Marie Benedict (the pen-name of lawyer-turned-writer Heather Terrell) sets the tone for many of the novels that follow, in that it explores what it’s like to be the highly-intelligent wife of a very famous man.
Mileva Marić, born in Serbia to well-to-do parents. was so outstanding at math that in 1891, when she was fifteen, her father requested special permission to enroll her as a private student at the all-male Royal Classical High School in Zagreb.
Subsequently, she enrolled in the Zurich Polytechnic, where she was the lone woman out of a group of six. And that is where this novel begins, with Mileva’s arrival in Zurich, her excruciating first day in class (she was not only female but Serbian) and how out of all the people there, the only person who was kind to her was classmate Albert Einstein.
I would say that around half of the novel was taken up with Einstein’s courtship of Mileva Maric, the birth of their illegitimate daughter Lieserl, and Lieserl’s mysterious disappearance from the record shortly after they eventually married in January 1903.