Title: The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
Book Beginnings quote:
November 28, 1905. Princeton, New Jersey. The Old North bell tolls the hour, and I realize that I'll be late.
Friday56 quote:
May 28, 1906. New York, New York. As I step into the vestibule of the Vanderbilt mansion, I am surrounded by women in extraordinary gowns with bodices gleaming with crystals and pearls, and men in white-tie formal wear, and I must force myself not to gape.
Summary: In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J.P. Morgan to curate his collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built J. Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York society and one of the most powerful women in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating skills, helping Morgan build a world-class collection.
But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. If anyone finds out she is "colored" her whole world would come crashing down. She must protect her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives. This is her story.
Review: I am a reader of two minds about this book. First, this is a captivating story about a real Black woman who successfully passed as white for nearly fifty years. I am admire all that Belle da Costa Greene was able to accomplish just as a woman in the days when men dominated all aspects of business and society. Her confidence and skills at organizing the library and then negotiating sales of new acquisitions were admirable. I also recognize how much she gave up to pull off this feat every single day, including losing her relationship with her father and most of her extended family. She must have felt very alone a good deal of the time, living on the knife's edge, where she could be found out at any minute instantly destroying not only her reputation and everything she had done for the library, but also the lives of her whole family.
On the other hand, the story read a little like a soap opera. I couldn't figure out if it was just the tone of the writing -- let's make this sound more exciting than it probably was -- or was Belle da Costa Greene's actual life a little like a real soap opera? When everyone at book club expressed these same feelings I realized it wasn't just me. Sometimes I have to chide myself for how snobby I can be about books I don't think are particularly well written. To their credit, however, both authors left notes at the end of the book explaining how they were able to use information from primary documents and how they had to guess at details that weren't fully fleshed out. For example, it is known that Greene's father lived in Chicago. It is also known that Greene took a non-business oriented trip to Chicago. The authors guessed Greene was visiting her father. Finding out these types of details helped me feel better about the book in general.
Interestingly after I got home from book club, I thought of a question no one thought to ask -- When did it become known that Belle da Costa Greene, who worked at the JP Morgan library from 1905-1947 before retiring, was a Black woman passing as white? I looked it up. The answer is 1999. Someone found her birth certificate which had the names of her parents and her race marked as "colored." I'd say she did a good job keeping her secret if it took folks nearly 100 years before they discovered the truth about her race and her real identity.
My rating: 4 stars.
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