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

Abstract

Reviewed by: What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books by Sheila Liming Arielle Zibrak WHAT A LIBRARY MEANS TO A WOMAN: EDITH WHARTON AND THE WILL TO COLLECT BOOKS, by Sheila Liming. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 280 pp. $108.00 hardback; $27.00 paperback; $27.00 ebook. Even among writers, Edith Wharton was exceptionally bookish. Or, perhaps, more accurately, the legend of Edith Wharton—constructed by both Wharton herself and the biographers and critics who have lionized her—is one of extreme bookishness. The question of what a library means to a woman, to borrow the evocative title of Sheila Liming’s work, seems to me deeply related to the question of what it means to be bookish. [End Page 168] Wharton’s bookishness is present in her own origin stories as a writer. Her two published autobiographies, A Backward Glance (1934) and “Life and I” (1920–1922), both place early narrative significance on a scene of a collection of books. Like Isabel Archer in Wharton’s close friend Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), readers of Wharton’s life first encounter her in a library—her father’s, a gentleman’s library that, to use Liming’s word, Wharton “revered,” though it was only “a second son’s collection” (p. 111). Liming’s four main chapters of What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books are organized around the various ways a library can function but what the book offers is richer than a single case study that unpacks the phenomenon of the private library. What a Library Means to a Woman is also a valuable entrant in the field of critical and biographical Wharton studies and a work that is wonderfully suggestive of new, feminist directions for the field of book studies. While Wharton’s older brothers were sent to the finest schools, the author was educated at home by a private tutor, Anna Bahlmann, whom Wharton scholars have recently given far more credit for Wharton’s intellectual formation following the publication of My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann by Irene Goldman Price in 2012. Nevertheless, the myth of Wharton places much emphasis on her autodidactism, a topic Liming takes up with critical aplomb. Connecting Wharton’s accounts of her own intellectual development to her investment in Emersonian individualism (and backing up these assertions with material proof through discussions of Wharton’s marginalia), Liming showcases the importance of earnest bookishness to Whartonian self-fashioning. What it means to be bookish is also a recurring theme in Wharton’s fiction. Liming’s deft close readings of Wharton’s bookish (and anti-bookish) characters impress in their accretion: Vance Weston of Hudson River Bracketed (1929) has his own autodidactic awakening in a cousin’s decaying library; Charity Royall of Summer (1917) spends her days working in a library she disdains; Paulina Anson in “The Angel at the Grave” (1901) is the inheritor and custodian of her famous grandfather’s library; and John Amherst of The Fruit of the Tree (1907), the titular character in Ethan Frome (1911), and Lily Bart’s suitors in The House of Mirth (1905) all have different relationships to their own highly significant personal libraries. As Liming points out, these latter library stewards—Lawrence Selden and Percy Gryce—can each be judged as disingenuous characters by their disingenuous relationships to their private collections. Gryce’s Americana is viewed by its owner as possessing only monetary and prestige value, while Selden’s personal library “speaks the truth about his hypocrisy and hubris” (p. 87). For Wharton, the truths that personally assembled libraries are superior to inherited libraries and books for reading superior to books [End Page 169] for collecting are as plain as the fact that a large chimney piece has no business in a space crafted for the consumption and discussion of literature. Given that Liming does a thorough and convincing job of demonstrating that Wharton prized the personal library as a key to understanding one’s character, she logically turns to the fascinating subject of what Wharton’s library says...