What a Library Means to a Woman

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, McSweeney’s, and the Chronicle Review.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Library as Space: Self-Making and Social Endangerment in The Decoration of Houses and Summer2. The Library as Hoard: Collecting and Canonicity in The House of Mirth and Eline Vere3. The Library as Network: Affinity, Exchange, and the Makings of Authorship4. The Library as Tomb: Monuments and Memorials in Wharton’s Short FictionConclusionNotesIndex

"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 collecting’-and 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 Liming’s 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 Parvenu’s 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 Liming’s 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 century’s most literary bibliophiles."-ALH Online Review