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Given Lise Meitner's very tough situation, and Hahn's complaints to her, it's no surprise that she wrote to him:

"Perhaps you cannot fully appreciate how unhappy it makes me to realize that you always think I am unfair and embittered, and that you also say so to other people. If you think it over, it cannot be difficult to understand what it means to me that I have none of my scientific equipment. For me that is much harder than everything else. But I am really not embittered - it is just that I see no real purpose in my life at the moment and I am very lonely...."

What *is* a surprise is that this is when she made her greatest discovery.

She couldn't bear spending the Christmas of 1938 alone, so she visited a friend in a small seaside village, and so did her nephew Otto Frisch, who was also an excellent physicist. They began talking about physics. According to letters from Hahn and Strassman, one of the "transuranics" was acting a lot like barium.

Talking over the problem, Meitner and Frisch realized what was going on: the neutrons were making uranium nuclei split into a variety of much lighter elements!

In short: fission.

(6/n)