{"id":2418,"date":"2022-02-04T17:00:04","date_gmt":"2022-02-04T22:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=2418"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:05:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:05:08","slug":"sheila-liming-what-a-library-means-to-a-woman-edith-wharton-and-the-will-to-collect-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2022\/02\/04\/sheila-liming-what-a-library-means-to-a-woman-edith-wharton-and-the-will-to-collect-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Sheila Liming. What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books<\/em>."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Sheila Liming. What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books<\/em>.<\/h1>\n\n
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Donna Harrington-Lueker<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a>, <\/span>Reviews<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Sheila Liming. What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books<\/em>. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 280 p. US$108 (cloth); $27 (paper) ISBN 978-1-5179-0704-4<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The 2,700-plus books at the Mount, Edith Wharton\u2019s historic Berkshire estate, represent only a portion of the novelist\u2019s remarkable collection. Another 2,500 volumes, which one of Wharton\u2019s heirs stored in a London warehouse after her death, were destroyed in the Blitz. And the volumes now in the Mount\u2019s collection themselves survived storage in an English castle (some have the wormholes to show for it) and in a bookseller\u2019s attic before a high-profile (and contentious) negotiation brought them to the Mount in 2006.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story behind that collection is the subject of Sheila Liming\u2019s What A Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect<\/em>, an expansive and nuanced exploration of the nature of libraries and archives, the ethos of book collecting, and the gendered \u201cself-making\u201d of a renowned novelist whose library, in Liming\u2019s words, \u201cgives voice to Wharton\u2019s varied articulations of her \u2018many selves\u2019\u201d (8). Liming\u2019s book also offers reflections on issues of authorship, inheritance, and literary influence and close readings of Wharton\u2019s own fiction, all while moving seamlessly among the varied methodologies of book history, literary analysis, feminist theory, \u201cdistant\u201d reading and other approaches, including those from the digital humanities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wharton\u2019s collection began with the modest \u201cgentleman\u2019s library\u201d of about 200 volumes that the novelist inherited after her father\u2019s death, a collection of classics\u2014works of \u201cpolite taste,\u201d uniformly bound\u2014that she had read among while she was growing up and that served as the foundation for her self-education. (Unlike her brothers, Wharton was not formally educated.) To those volumes, Wharton added thousands of others in her lifetime, distributing them among multiple households\u2014at Land\u2019s End in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Mount, for example, and at Pavillon Colombe and Saint-Claire-du-Ch\u00e2teau in France\u2014and leaving traces of her own practices as a writer, reader, and collector in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Underlining, marginalia, packing lists, book plates, the presence of cut (and uncut) pages testify to Wharton\u2019s behavior as a reader while inscriptions from family members and friends and the presence of \u201cassociation copies\u201d\u2014books owned by or associated with other authors\u2014help bring to life the varied social networks of the collection and its owner. An array of ephemera \u201ctipped in\u201d to various volumes\u2014dried flowers, pieces of pink ribbon, postcards, a raffle ticket for a wartime charity\u2014likewise testify to the collection\u2019s history of usage and to Liming\u2019s own close relationship with its materiality. (Liming spent several summers at the Mount working on EdithWhartonsLibrary.org, an interactive database of works in the collection.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What a Library Means to a Woman<\/em> also engages perceptively with Wharton\u2019s fiction where libraries and book collecting are common tropes. Like the novelist, protagonists in several novels\u2014The Fruit of the Tree<\/em> (1907), Ethan Frome <\/em>(1911), and Hudson River Bracketed<\/em> (1929), for example\u2014link reading and libraries with self-making or self-development. Others\u2014like Charity Royal of Summer <\/em>(1917)\u2014pointedly resist the experience a library might offer, shutting themselves off from any accrual of cultural capital. Two book collectors figure prominently in The House of Mirth<\/em> (1905)\u2014the urbane Lawrence Selden, who collects \u201cgood editions\u201d and \u201cvalues a thing for its rarity\u201d (like the doomed Lily Bart) and the compulsive collector of Americana, Percy Gryce, whose motive is fame and accumulation (91). Liming likewise reads The House of Mirth <\/em>against Eline Vere<\/em> (1889), a much earlier work by Dutch novelist Louis Couperus. Wharton owned a number of Couperus\u2019s works\u2014some of which can be found today in the library at the Mount\u2014which were translated into English and published by Appleton\u2019s in the 1890s. The similarities are striking, including scenes of the famous tableaux vivant with Lily Bart on display. Equally striking is Liming\u2019s discussion of the two novels, which moves beyond issues of likenesses to an argument about fin de si\u00e8cle anxieties about material consumption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it is Liming\u2019s reading of Wharton\u2019s collection as a whole\u2014a reading that draws on data visualization and techniques from the digital humanities\u2014that might attract the most interest from book historians. Working with a sample of 2,200 books from Wharton\u2019s library, for example, Liming constructs a \u201csocial network\u201d for Wharton\u2019s library showing those among Wharton\u2019s own contacts who had perhaps the most influence on her collection. Except for Wharton\u2019s own additions, her father, George Frederic Jones, was the largest single contributor to the library with his books accounting for about 8 percent of the total collection. But other family members gifted or owned books in Wharton\u2019s collection and so did those in Wharton\u2019s intellectual circle of friends in France. (Henry James was among them as was journalist Morton Fullerton with whom Wharton had an affair.) Walter Berry, Wharton\u2019s longtime companion and, next to her father, the largest source of books in her collection, is likewise noted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Breaking down the collection by dates of publication offers another lens on the collection, showing, for example, a period of intense collection in 1910 and 1911\u2014the time period in which Wharton began her divorce, sold the Mount, and moved to France. And in that period, Wharton\u2019s acquisitions looked more to the past than to the contemporary authors. Works by George Sand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Joshua Reynolds were acquired during this period as were volumes on Beethoven and works by Machiavelli. As Liming writes: \u201cWharton\u2019s library, though it grew considerably throughout the early part of the twentieth century, grew primarily backward, extending further into the nineteenth century and beyond\u201d (121).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What a Library Means to a Woman<\/em> ends with what Liming refers to as the \u201cafterlives\u201d of Wharton\u2019s library\u2014that is, with a narrative of what happened to the collection after the author\u2019s death. And that narrative in turn closes with the story of the highly publicized (and quite dramatic) negotiations that brought the collection back to the Mount. Liming\u2019s exploration of that library will be of interest to those who study libraries, readers, and collectors as well as to Wharton scholars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Donna Harrington-Lueker, Salve Regina University, Newport, R.I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2,700-plus books at the Mount, Edith Wharton\u2019s historic Berkshire estate, represent only a portion of the novelist\u2019s remarkable collection. Another 2,500 volumes, which one of Wharton\u2019s heirs stored in a London warehouse after her death, were destroyed in the Blitz. And the volumes now in the Mount\u2019s collection themselves survived storage in an English castle (some have the wormholes to show for it) and in a bookseller\u2019s attic before a high-profile (and contentious) negotiation brought them to the Mount in 2006.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5238,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888,1887],"tags":[1904,1936,1942,1952],"class_list":["post-2418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","category-reviews","tag-authorship","tag-libraries","tag-north-america","tag-provenance-collecting"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2418"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5666,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418\/revisions\/5666"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}