Packing My Library: On Sheila Liming's "What a Library Means to a Woman"

Sheila Liming | What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books | University of Minnesota Press | April 28, 2020 | 272 Pages

Many of us know (or think we know) Edith Wharton, The Writer. Heralded for her Pulitzer Prize-winning musings on aristocratic joyrides through the American Gilded Age, in novels such as The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. 

In What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books, Sheila Liming attempts to paint a portrait of Edith Wharton, ‘The Woman’ through the lens of Edith Wharton, ‘The Collector’. By analyzing the beloved objects Wharton left behind, she collages together a new understanding of Wharton’s motivations and desires. Liming is driven by the principle that “libraries are technologies of self-making,” and Wharton’s serves as a preeminent example. 

Though half of Wharton’s book collection was lost to bombings during the London Blitz in 1941, about 2,700 volumes remain, currently housed at her historic Massachusetts estate, The Mount. 

In the book’s introduction, Liming notes that Wharton’s collection would not have been considered, “exorbitant or remarkable by early twentieth-century standards,” and acknowledges that Wharton’s name has not, “previously surfaced amid the critical discourse surrounding print collecting or bibliomania.” But, Liming asserts that Wharton’s library, “forms a critical part of her archive,” and champions its significance within public discourse by stating that, “the books in it attest to her development as an author, to her righteous claims to self-fashioning and autodidacticism, and to her evolution as a producer not just of novels but of best-selling novels, with the phrase ‘best-selling’ lending a kind of critical gravitas to her status as both a consumer and a producer of textual commodities.” Put simply, Wharton loved her books. And in a world where upper class girls were denied formal schooling and Wharton’s family frequently moved around, her books became both her socio/cultural/intellectual education and  her metaphoric home. 

The ability for objects to carry heavy emotional weight is central to Liming’s thesis. “A hoard,” she writes, “whether it is the work of a single person or of an entire institution, represents an attempt to show how the stuff of human existence ‘adds up’ to something.” Here, we are to understand Wharton’s “hoard” of books as “adding up” to the story she has spun to represent her life and her legacy. 

Liming is clearly a devoted Wharton scholar. She has spent years researching at The Mount. Within her four main chapters (1. The Library as Space, 2. The Library as Hoard, 3. The Library as Network, and 4. The Library as Tomb), she utilizes a practice of close reading to connect plot-points and character developments within Wharton’s oeuvre to larger sociological debates surrounding inheritance, physical space, the canon, public vs. private ownership, networked affinities, and memorializations. The quality of research and attention to detail here is impressive, as is Liming’s ability to make dense literary theory engaging and accessible to a non-academic reader. But this is more than a work of well-executed literary analysis. The project is as much an act of preservation as it is one of wrestling with meaning. Throughout What a Library Means to a Woman, Liming weaves together a macrame of cultural criticism, object theory, feminist critique, and postmodern social theory to uncover a deeper, more holistic understanding of both Wharton’s personhood and the implications of collecting more generally. 

In the first chapter, Liming turns to Wharton’s 1897 interior design manual, The Decoration of Houses to gain insight into Wharton’s own tastes. Wharton designed her library to be a repository for social interaction and a catalyst for communion. The physical design, “discourages the collecting of objects in favor of the collecting of human relationships,” writes Leming. As much as Wharton fashions herself an autodidact, it is without a doubt that the act of sharing books and the dialogues that ensued were integral to Wharton’s experience of literature and her lifelong pursuit of knowledge. In chapter three, which dives deeper into the concept of literary networks, Liming adds that for Wharton, “reading constituted a social act.” She presents an infographic that makes visual where all of the volumes in Wharton’s library came from, having traced bookplates, notes, and other paraphernalia from within the collection-most were gifts from family, friends, and lovers. And these exchanges had a profound impact on both Wharton’s interpersonal relationships and the expansion of her worldview. In this way, we are to understand the social and the intimate to be intrinsically linked. 

Think about it: where, and who, have your books come from? Has a shared connection over a novel ever deepened a relationship with a loved one? Is reading borrowed books-with their margin notes and their underlined passages-not an automatic transporter into someone else’s inner psyche? As much as libraries are a “technology of self-making,” as Liming says, so too are books a “technology of intimacy.” 

But this acknowledgement of books as objects of intimacy hinders on our cultural understanding of books as special items. And as the Industrial Revolution gave rise to widespread printing technologies, the monetary value of books cascaded. Wharton herself, and her characters, is known for a total distrust of modernity. Most of her novels are considered historical fiction-written during the early 20th century, but harkening back to the late 19th century, which she saw as a simpler and more romantic time. Though Liming’s historicization of the afterlife of Wharton’s library-including the appraisal process and institutional bidding wars that occurred after Wharton’s death-accounts for the economic inevitability of monetary value, she ultimately argues that we should understand the value of libraries for their, “shared histories of use and engagement, as well as through personal testimonies and forms of emotional attachment.” Books carry weight, as Liming says. They’re heavy with history, with our histories, and our emotions. 

At this point, it would be impossible not to note that I am reading What a Library Means to a Woman on my computer, in a downloaded PDF format. As a society, we have progressed far beyond Wharton’s fears of modernity into a completely digitized world. Now, more than ever, our lives have moved online. In this worldview, is Liming’s entire thesis possibly already outmoded? What does this theory of libraries as catalysts for self-making mean for a future generation whose reading materials no longer exist as printed matter, but as digital copies? Liming laments Wharton’s distaste for, “The loss of the library as a home for the housing of the self, as opposed to an impersonal site for the housing of information and content.” These days, “content”-that sickly saccharine hamster wheel we can’t find our way off of-seems to be much of what we’re left with. Music serves as a similar example-once we had record collections, now we have Spotify “libraries” where our favorite albums are not owned, but merely borrowed. In this reality-where our personal possessions are intangible and “ownership” is relegated to the digital cloud-how are we to define self under Liming’s terms? 

Bookplates, a mainstay in private libraries up until the early 20th century, can give us a clue into our societal obsession with proprietarily-based articulations of identity. Postulating a motive behind the popularity of bookplates, Liming gestures to an, “insecurity about the ephemerality of ownership.” When the future of our territory is uncertain, we feel the need to safeguard it more aggressively. Perhaps aristocratic and educated Americans at the time, like Wharton and her circle of friends, were anticipating a declining relevance of ownership as an arbiter of social and cultural capital. In writing our names on our things, on claiming certain objects, we’re reifying our relationships with them, broadcasting our interests and our conquests to the world writ large. Maybe it will become true that, in an era of Kindles and e-books, the books that we do choose to physically purchase will be granted more merit. If we’re keeping limited personal libraries, it will only be the most remarkable-the most intertwined with our ideas of ourselves-that make it onto our bookshelves.  

Liming’s fourth and final chapter considers the library as tomb-as a monument we build to ourselves, as a way for people to better know us after we’re gone. Liming turns to Wharton’s 1901 short story, “Angel at the Grave,” which features a character who is held back by the burden of her literary possessions. Of the story’s protagonist, Wharton writes, “She sat in the library, among the carefully tended books and portraits; and it seemed to her that she had been walled alive into a tomb hung with the effigies of dead ideas.” As much as Wharton clung to old-fashioned ways of life, so too was she astute in understanding that one can’t hide in the passive inactions of the past, or the protective spaces filled with our favorite things. Liming interprets the scene as Wharton’s manifesto of sorts; she writes, “It is not enough to read… One must create anew.”

And here is the ultimate lesson we are to glean from reading What a Library Means to a Woman in this moment: the project of our own education among books can and should be continued now, even in our isolation. Though it feels as if there is little forward movement in our lives, the process of self-making is still available to us. We can still expand our understanding of the world, even if we can’t partake in it. Liming writes that Wharton’s library was her way of “trying to forge the material proof of her own existence.” Now is our time-for reading, for writing, for reflecting. Not only is documentation important for historical record, it’s important to keep a record of our interior lives-so that when we emerge from this, we can all begin to create anew.