The Personal Librarian

by Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray ($17.00 paperback, available to order online here or call the store, 505-988-4226)

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR!

Review by Bettye Kearse, author of The Other Madisons. Call the store to order.

This year in April, as Santa Fe was awakening from winter, I hopped a flight to the city that, according to Frank Sinatra, never sleeps. New York, New York, is also the town that John Pierpont Morgan helped build into a global financial hub during America’s Gilded Age. Additionally, he was an ambassador of literature and culture, and my spring destination was the impressive Morgan Library & Museum on Madison Avenue to see the exhibit, “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy.”

In the 1890s, Morgan, whose aim was to rival Europe’s greatest collections, began assembling a world-class library of letters, rare books, and manuscripts. Until reading The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, I hadn’t known that many of the Morgan Library’s most venerated works were acquired between 1905 and 1924 by Belle Marion Greener, a Black woman who claimed to be Portuguese, renamed herself Belle da Costa Greene, and passed for white.

In The Personal Librarian, Benedict, who is white, and Murray, who is Black, merge their differing life experiences to create a compelling, broadly encompassing work of historical fiction that explores the internal and external forces that lead a twentieth-century African American woman to sacrifice her heritage to achieve the legacy she hopes to leave. As a Black female physician, though retired, I am well aware that Belle’s fight against racism, sexism, and classism is as real today as it was more than one hundred years ago.   

The novel’s intimate first-person narrative made it seem that Belle was speaking directly to me, asking me to root for her. Like Belle, I am a clothes horse. So, when she shared that choosing a red gown for an important professional event enabled her to distinguish herself among a roomful of conservatively dressed men, I actually said out loud, “You, go, girl!”