Everyone seems to be raving about The Personal Librarian (#1,020), a novel based on the life of Belle da Costa Greene, J.P. Morgan's real life personal librarian. Her life was, in fact, remarkable, as she carved out a niche in the rarified world of rare book, document and art collectors on behalf of her employer. She was considered to be the premier career woman of her day on both sides of the Atlantic. That she managed to do this with no academic or formal training for her position with the Pierpont Morgan Library, teaching herself what she needed to know along the way makes her story even more remarkable. Plus she had an layer of stress: she was black, passing as white in an increasingly segregated America.
Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray co-authored this book to cover all aspects of Belle's life and times. This is a very "woke" rendition of Belle's story. Interestingly enough, the authors never mention in their lengthy notes at the end of the novel that Belle's secret was not uncovered until more than fifty years after her death, when the author of an extensive biography on J.P. Morgan uncovered it in her research in 1999. Belle had destroyed her own papers to conceal her secret, but she was outed in the end. Would Belle herself have wanted that to be the focus of this novel? I'm not sure she would have. Her legacy lives on in the now public collections and exhibitions of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City.
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