Siberia 1833.
Forty-one-year-old Maria Mendeleeva is enduring her seventeenth pregnancy. Her husband Ivan has lost his sight, and her brother Vasily has left their grandfather’s glass factory in ruins. The factory Maria hungered for as a child. On the brink of poverty and her family’s only remaining hope, Maria must find a way to make the factory viable. She must find the power to bring her grandfather's dreams back to life. She must make the glass sing.
The Maternal Element is a sweeping, gripping epic with an extraordinary woman at its heart. Maria Mendeleeva – mother of Dmitri Mendeleev, who devised the Periodic Table of the Elements – is a heroine like no other. A woman who refuses to be quashed by circumstance, Maria fights against the strictures of her time to gain an education for herself and for her children as she traverses the Urals of Russia seeking opportunity and safety for her family. A vivid and visceral portrait of a woman history has long since forgotten, The Maternal Element is a manifesto for truth, female empowerment and defying societal expectations.
The Maternal Element by Kate Nicholls was published by Salt on 15 June 2026. My thanks to the publisher who sent my copy for review as part of this #RandomThingsTours Virtual Book Tour
I've been really enjoying historical fiction recently and The Maternal Element is another wonderful read that has taught me so much. There are some historical figures whose names are everywhere, yet the names of the people who supported them are unknown. In The Maternal Element, Kate Nicholls turns her attention to Maria Mendeleeva, mother of Dmitri Mendeleev, who devised the Periodic Table of the Elements and gives this remarkable woman the recognition that she really deserves.
This is a fabulous, immersive novel. Maria is a woman living in a society that has very definite ideas about what women should and should not do. She is a wife and mother, she has had seventeen pregnancies. She is also extremely intelligent, curious and determined. When circumstances threaten her family, Maria refuses to simply accept what fate appears to have decided for her.
The author brings Maria to life so vividly. She is formidable, certainly, but she is never presented as some impossibly perfect heroine. There are frustrations, difficult decisions and moments when the demands placed upon her feel almost overwhelming. Her complexity makes her so compelling. Her determination to secure education and opportunity, both for herself and for her children, is particularly powerful.
The setting is really so impressive. The cold, the distances, the isolation and the sheer physical effort required to keep a family and a business going are wonderfully described. I was especially fascinated by the glass factory and the descriptions of the craft itself. There is something almost magical about the transformation of raw materials into something beautiful.
This is a substantial, sweeping historical novel, but at its heart is a very intimate story about motherhood, ambition, sacrifice and the hunger for knowledge.
I knew Dmitri Mendeleev's name before opening this book. I didn't know Maria's. Thanks to Kate Nicholls, she is not a woman I will easily forget.
Kate Nicholls was born in the UK in 1954.
Raised in a theatrical family, she had a successful acting career but gave it up to study evolutionary biology.
She raised and homeschooled her five children while researching lions in the Okavango Delta.
A passionate believer in liberal arts education she founded a homeschool company in 2011.
She lives happily in Rome where she studies, teaches and writes overlooking the Tiber.
She is the author of Under the Camelthorn Tree (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019).
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