What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books

by Sheila Liming

Examining the personal library and the making of self

When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. What a Library Means to a Woman examines personal libraries as technologies of self-creation in modern America, focusing on Wharton and her remarkable collection of books.

Sheila Liming explores the connection between libraries and self-making in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture, from the 1860s to the 1930s. She tells the story of Wharton’s library in concert with Wharton scholarship and treatises from this era concerning the wider fields of book history, material and print culture, and the histories (and pathologies) of collecting. Liming’s study blends literary and historical analysis while engaging with modern discussions about gender, inheritance, and hoarding. It offers a review of the many meanings of a library collection, while reading one specific collection in light of its owner’s literary celebrity.

What a Library Means to a Woman was born from Liming’s ongoing work digitizing the Wharton library collection. It ultimately argues for a multifaceted understanding of authorship by linking Wharton’s literary persona to her library, which was, as she saw it, the site of her self-making.  

Genres: Books About Books, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Womens, American, Biography Memoir

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 7, 2020

About the author

Sheila Liming is the author of Office and What a Library Means to a Woman, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney's, Lapham's Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Point, among others. She lives, teaches, and plays the accordion in Burlington, Vermont. Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time is her latest book.

Reviews

[Jay Shelat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant and a pleasure to read.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought I’d already posted about this. What a wonderful book! Incredible research, and really interesting to read. Academia needs more books like this.

[Colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think that I was the right/intended audience for this book. I wanted much more commentary on the objects themselves and would have liked to dig deeper into some of the themes offered by that approach (how many books had marginalia? Did that mean anything?). Definitely an interesting format/structure for scholarship.

[Cassia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a different book than I'd expected from the title and cover- more emphasis on Wharton's writings than I had anticipated. I wish the author had engaged more with librarians, archivists, and LIS literature when approaching the topics like library spaces and book collecting. But I enjoyed the close readings of Wharton's work and considering the role of the library both in Wharton's life and in her texts. Interesting personal, material, and cultural history in addition to the literary theory.
*My lack of familiarity with Wharton's work puts me at a bit of a disadvantage in my review, but it also didn't make reading the book any more difficult, which I appreciate!

[lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

"But where topics of personal significance and professional growth are concerned, there can be no question: Wharton's library crucially informed her understandings of herself and played a vital role in shaping the narrative of self-development that emerged in concert with her identity as an author."

When I found this in the gift shop at The Mount, I simply couldn't resist buying it. The title sounded right up my alley, the cover was gorgeous, and because that pilgrimage to Edith's estate in the Berkshires meant so much to me, I just couldn't walk away without some kind of literary momento.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be pretty disappointing. What I thought would be fascinating insight into Edith's library, the books she loved most, and the notes and marginalia she left in them, turned out to be much more academic and rooted in traditional literary criticism. That criticism often felt like a stretch to me as someone who has a degree in English literature and knows what it's like to be reaching and grasping for any concrete argument in texts that have been overanalyzed by everyone from undergrads to tenured professors. What could have been a fun, lighter look at the history of Edith's collection and its influence on her life and writing was bogged down by an overly pedantic writing style, intent on lengthy sentences distractingly interspersed with phrases like "thus", "we see", and "therefore", and strapped to themes like "space", "network", and "tomb", all favorites of 19th-century literary scholars that did little to excite.

While I did sadly feel like the concept and research that went into this book were wasted in this overly academic format, that's not to say that Liming didn't have a lot of great insights to share, especially in the personal interviews that she conducted with George Ramsden. In fact, the conclusion alone was almost worth the rest of the tedious slogging I went through to make it that far. The story of how Wharton's book collection made its way back to The Mount after nearly a century abroad is truly fascinating, and Leming's relationship with the team there, as well as with Ramsden, made it all the more interesting.

However, unless you're familiar with academic texts and are as big a Wharton fan as I am, I don't think I can really recommend this. The beautiful cover and my own giddiness at the time of purchase both really got me here. If you're standing in The Mount gift shop right now contemplating the same decision I made, I might suggest that you resist.

[Nicolas Lontel · Rating 3 out of 5]

L'appréciation de cet essai est clairement modulé par le fait que je n'ai jamais lu Edith Warton ni même jamais vraiment entendu parler d'elle. Lire un essai complet sur ses goûts, ses acquisitions, ses connaissances, ses ami·es, ses influences, sa famille, ses maris, et évidemment ses livres, est peut-être un peu intense sans connaissance de la personne qui est abordée. J'ai clairement été attiré par le titre, et le sous-titre m'avait pas mal échappé avant d'avoir la copie papier.

C'est définitivement un travail d'archivage, d'analyse quantitative et qualitative très intéressante. Plusieurs parties traitent définitivement des collections, du point de vue de collectionneurs et collectionneuses de livres et du pourquoi derrière leur collection. La conclusion, ainsi qu'un peu le dernier chapitre, était aussi très élaborée, beaucoup plus personnelle et vraiment fascinante derrière les voyages de la collection, comment cette dernière a parcouru à travers divers personnes, les sacrifices et désillusions auquel beaucoup ont du faire face. C'est définitivement une des parties qui m'a le plus accroché (puisque ça demandait moins de connaître l'autrice).

Autrement, l'essai est très rigoureux, très intéressant, fait parfois des aller-retour entre le biographique, les écrits et la collection, les uns pour supporter les autres et c'est définitivement bien articulé d'un bout à l'autre sans être une simple application biographique de l'oeuvre sur l'autrice ou la collection. Je pense que pour les personnes qui connaissent un peu mieux l'autrice, cet essai doit être vraiment intéressant, ça m'a un peu donné le goût de voir ce qu'elle a écrit, mais pour être honnête, j'aurais dû lire cet essai après avoir lu Edith Wharton et m'être renseignée sur l'autrice, pas avant.

[Jeremiah · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot to be said and discussed on this book, but essentially Liming explores how the act of collection reveals significant implications about one's cultural, intellectual, and motivational makeup. For example, one might perceive books or artifacts as simply self-contained objects that offer monetary gain but are not to be interacted with, or one could view them as having cultural, intellectual, and artistic value that should be appreciated. In the cold, capitalist world of value exchange calculations that Liming presents, both approaches assign different forms of value to the objects but the author is clearly in favor of the latter (as is probably anyone reading this). Liming argues that collecting for the cultural and intellectual benefit is a vehicle for self-making, personal intellectual development, and even the fostering of dialogue, both in enabling the works or artifacts to speak for themselves through engagement with them and in discussing the works in the modern day. In contrast, the monetary-value approach is presented as an anti-social mindset as the collector generally holds the objects simply for resale and thus stifles the potential dialogue and cultivation that could take place. Again there is much more to be said but I will leave the rest for future readers to discover. I will say though that it got a little weird when she started talking about the library as a tomb and how the reader could literally inhabit the body of the dead writer and see through their eyes by reading their books. In any case a very thought-provoking and insightful work in general.

[Katherine Burd · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really, really enjoyed reading this book. Though each chapter is a distinct scholarly essay - and therefore the text itself can feel disjointed when one is, as I have been, in a rhythm of reading more popular texts - the unpeeling of layers of fiction, collection, and self-making in this book is brilliant to read. I loved the way my literary critical wheels turned, and the way that Liming both responds to her field and addresses contemporary concerns about the value of things and artifacts in a globally networked, capitalistic life. I’ve always loved Wharton for her position in history as one observing the arrival of a new world; this book made me see her as even more of a pillar than I had before. Definitely read if you’re interested in book culture or new materialism.

[Michael Lindgren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This inventive, free-wheeling book takes a close reading of the contents of Edith Wharton's library as a springboard for a brilliant investigation of the nature of books, publishing, reading, and consumerism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For Wharton, Liming writes, "books offered a kind of solid, material ballast helped to offset the ephemeral and fleeting qualities of a life lived among a shifting assortment of spaces." By "forging connections between human subjects and print objects," Liming has practiced a mode of analysis that could quite well be sui generis. The writing is, especially by the standards of academia, unusually light-handed and clear.

[Melissa]

Absorbing and fascinating study focused on Edith Wharton's library at The Mount, her home in the Berkshires, meticulously researched and beautifully presented. I found the exploration of the many ways Wharton's library signifies her conceptualization of herself as a self-taught and self-created reader and writer, as well supporting and serving as a space for her solitary and social, individual and community ventures and undertakings, fascinating to think about. As a writer with a sizeable library of my own, I thoroughly enjoyed considering my relationship to and with my own books!

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically an indepth analysis of libraries as different social and temporal meanings, all very true but this is def for someone who is in the literature space academically. It seems really well researched and written with literature and examples from literature as evidence for her claims. Def ended skimming most of this book but her main thesis is right: library AWESOME and much love ❤️ they are so special and they do mean a lot to a woman

[Olivia Bowers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started quite slow, but the final chapters asserting the views of the library as a tomb, memorial, and a hoard really resonated and the connections to Wharton’s literature were much stronger.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book! Honestly it was a deep dive into Edith Wharton and her life and library and while it did take me a bit longer than normal to read- I was enthralled the entire time. Absolutely 100% recommended!