What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books
(Paperback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books
By (Author) Sheila Liming
University of Minnesota Press
University of Minnesota Press
29th May 2020
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000
Gender studies: women and girls
813.52
Physical Properties
Paperback
272
Width 140mm, Height 216mm, Spine 38mm
Description
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 li
Reviews
"A generous reassessment of Edith Wharton and materialized cultures. With this exceptional interpretation of the modern bookshelf, Sheila Liming offers page after page of unanticipated insight into gender and literary production. This is mandatory reading for those of us committed, like Wharton, to harboring an ethos of collectingand for those of us, like this brave critic, committed to Wharton herself."Scott Herring, Indiana University
"This imaginative, deeply learned study illuminates the role of libraries and books for Edith Wharton, but it also provides an important examination of what the art of collecting books in the late nineteenth century tells us about how women writers and readers created networks of intellectual labor and ambition. Lyrically written and brilliantly argued, Sheila Limings study is also an indispensable meditation on the act of collecting and the unseen worlds ordinary and extraordinary readers and writers created through it."Stephanie Foote, author of The Parvenus Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism
"It makes sense that Liming would posit the meaning of libraries in general in a book about what a library means to a woman: the universalization of intellectual inheritance passes by necessity through women. Sheila Limings fascinating book proves her to be an exemplary heir."Los Angeles Review of Books
"An enormously valuable addition to our understanding of one of the twentieth centurys most literary bibliophiles."ALH Online Review
Author Bio
Sheila Liming is assistant professor of English at the University of North Dakota. She has contributed to The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeneys, and the Chronicle Review.
