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

Sheila Liming

ISBN 10: 1517907047 / ISBN 13: 9781517907044

Published by University of Minnesota Press, 2020

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # B9781517907044

Bibliographic Details

• Title: What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1517907047
• ISBN 13: 9781517907044
• Binding: Paperback / softback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 460 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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.  

About the Author

Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College, where she teaches in the Professional Writing program. She has contributed to The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney's, and the Chronicle Review, among other publications.