Are you here after reading The Personal Librarian, or another fictional treatment of Miss Greene’s life? An Illuminated Life is the definitive biography of Belle da Costa Greene. I couldn’t answer all of your, or my, questions, but I track the life of J.P. Morgan’s librarian from a few generations before her birth as Belle Marian Greener through her celebrated career and shrouded life as a recognized figure in New York’s artistic, literary, scholarly, museum, and elite to bohemian social circles.
The secret life of the sensational woman behind the Morgan masterpieces, who lit up New York society.
What would you give up to achieve your dream? When J. P. Morgan hired Belle da Costa Greene in 1905 to organize his rare book and manuscript collection, she had only her personality and a few years of experience to recommend her. Ten years later, she had shaped the famous Pierpont Morgan Library collection and was a proto-celebrity in New York and the art world, renowned for her self-made expertise, her acerbic wit, and her flirtatious relationships. Born to a family of free people of color, Greene changed her name and invented a Portuguese grandmother to enter white society. In her new world, she dined both at the tables of the highest society and with bohemian artists and activists. She also engaged in a decades-long affair with art critic Bernard Berenson. Greene is pure fascination—the buyer of illuminated manuscripts who attracted others to her like moths to a flame.
An Illuminated Life:
Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege
REVIEWS
PW Reviews 2007 April #3
“Ardizzone's competent, complimentary biography explains the complicated, glamorous woman who transcended her lack of formal higher education and obfuscated her race to become head of the Pierpont Morgan Library and confidante of the financial mogul who founded it…Ardizzone (coauthor, Love on Trial) showcases the impressive talents of a woman who once wielded enormous power in New York society.”
LJ Reviews 2007 May #I - Shelley Cox, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
“Ardizzone more than succeeds in portraying a vivid figure who rose to the top in a segregated, paternalistic world yet suffered loneliness and was haunted by personal demons. A valuable work for students of early 20th-century culture as well as for librarians, feminists, and students of race relations. For general and specialized collections. (Illustrations not seen.)”
Kirkus Reviews 2007 April #I
“Thorough biography of the intriguing woman who organized financier J.P. Morgan's rare books and illuminated manuscripts. ... Ardizzone (American Studies/Notre Dame) makes an important contribution by bringing Greene's little-known, culturally significant work to light.”
Martha Hodes, author of The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century
“Heidi Ardizzone challenges the lived experience of "passing" and indeed the whole construct of "passing" in American history. With deep archival research and imagination alike, Ardizzone has interrogated historical sources that document suspicion, innuendo, gossip, rumor, and family secrets, thereby recreating a single intriguing life and offering us a deep cultural history of the art and literary worlds of New York and Europe at the turn of the last century. * An Illuminated Life* ultimately illuminates a life that makes us rethink commonplace ideas about race and racial classification.”
Carla Kaplan, editor of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters