new york times book review the personal librarian

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J.p. morgan's personal librarian was a black woman. this is her story..

Karen Grigsby Bates

I have a confession: I am not a fan of the passing trope. From Nella Larsen's 1929 classic, Passing , to the original Imitation of Life (the 1934 movie starred the incomparable Fredi Washington as Peola, the little girl who wanted to be white) to Britt Bennett's 2020 novel The Vanishing Half , the notion of a Black person posing as white to escape her Blackness just felt ... tired.

"Deep down, all Black people want to be white." I heard that in a social psychology class, repeated as if it were a truism. It's not. At several points in childhood and as an adult, I've loved the notion of being rich, but being white? I cannot imagine it. I wouldn't be me.

And that, basically, is at the crux of The Personal Librarian , a new novel by Heather Terrell (writing as Marie Benedict) and Victoria Christopher Murray. Their heroine, Belle Da Costa Greene, was one of the most prominent career women of her time. As the personal librarian to financier J.P.Morgan, she pursued and curated a collection of rare books, manuscripts and art that became world-renowned.

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What the world didn't know was that Belle Da Costa Greene was Black. Or, in the parlance of the day, colored. Greene was born into a prominent family of pale Black Washingtonians in 1883. Her parents were intellectuals. Her father, Richard T. Greener, was the first Black graduate of Harvard. He was also an ardent race man, and spent his life pressing for racial equality. Greene's mother, Genevieve Fleet, determined that racial equality wasn't going to happen in her lifetime, and after the family's move to New York, she declared them white in the 1905 NY State Census. That subterfuge became the cause of a huge rift — her parents separated, and Belle's family subsequently lived as white.

Belle Marion Greener became Belle Da Costa Greene — the Da Costa name an allusion to a fabricated Portuguese grandmother, a convenient explanation for Belle's olive complexion. (Contemporary portraits show an attractive woman who many Black people would immediately recognize as kindred; apparently Gilded Age white folks were easier to fool.)

Belle meets J.P.

The family's entire fortunes — where they lived, their occupations, everything — were completely dependent on Belle's white identity, as her mother constantly reminded her. When she became friends with financier J. Pierpont Morgan's nephew when they both worked in the rare books library at Princeton, young Morgan suggested to his uncle that he consider Belle as his personal librarian. In an interview, something about the young woman's intelligence and humor appealed to Morgan: She was hired on the spot.

As the two began to work closely together, Morgan came to trust Belle's vision and expertise. He knew that under her astute eye his collection would be more than an assortment of rarities only one of the world's richest men could acquire. Belle could provide an important missing link: context. And indeed, the Morgan Library became known as a private collection of rare books, manuscripts and art that competed with esteemed public institutions such as the British Museum. As the literal face of the library, Belle became a power in her own right, courted by art dealers, embraced by the socially powerful, profiled as an elegant careerist at a time when working women were rare.

Paying a price for a new life

But as Benedict and Murray show, there was a terrible cost to maintaining that façade. Belle was cut off from her beloved extended family in DC: "Once Mama made the decision that we would live as white," she says. "We could not take the risk." And while she had many lovers (including famed art historian Bernard Berenson), she could marry none:

I've always known that, because of my heritage, a traditional relationship would not be possible for me ... because a marriage means children, and that is something I cannot hazard. Without the fairer skin of my siblings, I could never risk bearing a child whose skin color might reveal my deception.

Benedict, who is white, and Murray, who is African American, do a good job of depicting the tightrope Belle walked, and her internal conflict from both sides — wanting to adhere to her mother's wishes and move through the world as white even as she longed to show her father she was proud of her race. Like Belle and her employer, Benedict and Murray had almost instant chemistry, and as a result, the book's narrative is seamless. And despite my aversion to the passing trope, I became hooked.

Belle Da Costa Greene is not front and center of the Morgan Library's story now. But she will be much more visible when The Morgan celebrates its centennial as a public institution in 2024. Which is fitting, as it was she who persuaded Jack Morgan to donate his father's astonishing library to the city. It's a gift that honors J.P. Morgan, his descendants — and the personal librarian who was critical to the Morgan's success.

clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian had two identities. It took two authors to tell her story.

Historical fiction writer Heather Terrell (who also writes under the name Marie Benedict) was introduced to Belle da Costa Greene between bookshelves at New York’s Morgan Library over 20 years ago. The docent — whom she has tried to find since — told her about a Black woman who passed as White and worked as J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian in the early 1900s. Terrell wasn’t yet writing historical fiction about women — she was a lawyer — but the story lingered in the back of her head.

Once she read Black author Victoria Christopher Murray’s work two years ago, she knew she found the partner she was waiting for to tackle da Costa Greene’s story. To write about a Black woman who passed as non-Black with an author she had never met was a process, especially when the editing coincided with the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and a pandemic .

Female-centered historical novels are dogged by questions of accuracy. Hence the author’s note.

The Washington Post talked to Terrell and Murray about what it was like to work on “ The Personal Librarian ” when so much of the world was falling apart.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: I feel like any kind of collaboration is difficult — especially when you’re crafting one character. How is creating a fictional narrative arc possible in conjunction with another mind?

Murray : I had written six other novels with another author. So I always say that I’m in the Guinness Book of World Records. A lot of people, after they write one book with an author, they never want to see that person again. So I’m in the Guinness Book of World Records, because I got the two best writing partners ever. It was so easy. You have a person to talk through everything with. When we finished “The Personal Librarian” and I had to start my next book, I felt so alone.

Terrell: I felt adrift.

Murray : Exactly! I know from the outside it looks like it’s something that’s very difficult to do. But when you find your soul mate writing partner, it is almost easier to write with them than to write alone.

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Q: Can you talk about beginning the editing process in June of 2020? What was it like to edit a book about a Black woman who existed during a time of intense racial strife during another time of intense racial strife and solitude?

Murray : It was — I don’t even know the words — it was a safe place for me to land. Every day, when we got on the phone, we got to see each other. As we were talking and editing together, we would just say, this is why Belle passed as White. This is why she did it. We spent the first hour of every day talking about the situation that was going on around us. We were talking about the world and then we talked about the book.

Terrell: We knew before we wrote the book that the parallels were clear. Belle’s father fought for equality in the years of reconstruction after the Civil War. He was a big advocate of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and he fought alongside people who are maybe a little bit better-known, like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. And in response to this promise of equality, there was a horrible explosion of racism in our country — segregation and Jim Crow laws. And that’s what Belle had to deal with. That’s why she was forced to pass as White. The dream her father had of this equal world where people would be judged according to their merits and not the color of their skin, that promise kind of disappeared as Belle became an adult.

Here we are envisioning Belle’s world and her place and the really terrible, hard decisions she had to make to put her father’s legacy and teachings in her past. And at the same time, the same things are happening in our own world. So every day, we’re processing the modern explosion of racism, which had been going on but it was becoming more and more apparent. Belle’s life, at least for me, became more alive, more real. But for me personally, every day I’m looking at the world through Victoria’s eyes and Belle’s eyes. And I am just getting angry.

Murray : It was a horrible experience, but what was also so great about it is how we both knew how Belle felt. Because now we didn’t have to imagine it, we were living it. I mean, once I read about Belle da Costa Greene, I knew what she was going through. I knew that every day she went out of her house wearing a mask. I knew all the questions and things that she had to have inside, but she couldn’t ask out loud. Heather always says, “Belle could never be her authentic self.”

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Q: For Marie, why did you decide to take on a co-author? For Victoria, I would love to hear your perspective on the #ownvoices wave in the book world [identifying diverse books written by members of that group] and how that might operate in conjunction with Black Lives Matter and this book.

Terrell: Belle da Costa Green has been hovering at the periphery of my imagination for decades. Once I turned to writing exclusively about historical women, she was always there. But it did not feel right or appropriate for me to try and tell the story of a Black woman without a Black woman. I think, as an author of fiction, you can envision a lot. But there are certain stories that deserve to have a storyteller who has had those experiences themselves or had similar.

This was a leap that I didn’t want to take or feel like it was right to take myself. I feel so blessed — I literally picture Victoria and I holding hands and leaping over that abyss together. And I am so fortunate that she took that leap with me.

Murray : I just honor Heather for even thinking, maybe I should include Belle’s other authentic voice — because Belle did live partially as a White woman. Most of the time, [Black] voices are not heard. That’s where the #ownvoices matter comes in — because so often, other people have been trying to tell our stories. And when people tell our stories, the stories are watered down.

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Q: We’ve talked about how much Victoria’s voice was needed in bringing Belle to life. But because she navigated so much of the world as a “White” woman, do you think Marie’s perspective was also needed to create this narrative?

Murray : I do not believe that a Black woman could have done justice to Belle, just as I believe a White woman couldn’t have done her justice either. We had to find a way to blend these two lives together for her and that’s what I think we did.

Terrell: But at the end of the day, when Belle put her head down on her pillow, she was a Black woman. She had to wear a White mask to survive in this racist world. She was really brought up by both of her parents to celebrate her Black heritage and the importance of equality. It was very important to us to find a place for Belle to be her authentic self. She never had a family of her own. She couldn’t, because she couldn’t risk what her child might look like. I spent a lot of time thinking about the sacrifices, sacrifice of her culture, sacrifice of her heritage, sacrifice of her personal choices, her family, in order to succeed in the world and pass. Victoria helped me understand what that weight would have been like.

Q: What do you hope readers get from this book?

Terrell : Our greatest hope is that White and Black readers have the experience of reading the book, seeing the different sides of Belle’s life and coming together to have their own frank conversations. I think it’s only in having those honest conversations, owning our own authentic views and experiences, that we can actually cross a divide.

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THE PERSONAL LIBRARIAN

by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 29, 2021

Strangely stuffy and muted.

The little-known story of the Black woman who supervised J. Pierpont Morgan’s storied library.

It's 1905, and financier J.P. Morgan is seeking a librarian for his burgeoning collection of rare books and classical and Renaissance artworks. Belle da Costa Greene, with her on-the-job training at Princeton University, seems the ideal candidate. But Belle has a secret: Born Belle Marion Greener, she is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard, and she's passing as White. Her mother, Genevieve, daughter of a prominent African American family in Washington, D.C., decided on moving to New York to live as White to expand her family’s opportunities. Richard, an early civil rights advocate, was so dismayed by Genevieve’s decision that he left the family. As Belle thrives in her new position, the main source of suspense is whether her secret will be discovered. But the stakes are low—history discloses that the career-ending exposure she feared never came. There are close calls. J.P. is incensed with her but not because of her race: She considered buying a Matisse. Anne Morgan, J.P.’s disgruntled daughter, insinuates that Belle has “tropical roots,” but Belle is perfectly capable of leveraging Anne’s own secrets against her. Leverage is a talent of Belle’s, and her ruthless negotiating prowess—not to mention her fashion sense and flirtatious mien—wins her grudging admiration and a certain notoriety in the all-White and male world of curators and dealers. Though instructive about both the Morgan collection and racial injustice, the book is exposition-laden and its dialogue is stilted—the characters, particularly Belle, tend to declaim rather than discuss. The real Belle left scant records, so the authors must flesh out her personal life, particularly her affair with Renaissance expert Bernard Berenson and the sexual tension between Belle and Morgan. But Belle’s mask of competence and confidence, so ably depicted, distances readers from her internal clashes, just as her veneer must have deterred close inquiry in real life.

Pub Date: June 29, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-10153-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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HAPPY PLACE

by Emily Henry ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2023

A wistfully nostalgic look at endings, beginnings, and loving the people who will always have your back.

Exes pretend they’re still together for the sake of their friends on their annual summer vacation.

Wyn Connor and Harriet Kilpatrick were the perfect couple—until Wyn dumped Harriet for reasons she still doesn’t fully understand. They’ve been part of the same boisterous friend group since college, and they know that their breakup will devastate the others and make things more than a little awkward. So they keep it a secret from their friends and families—in fact, Harriet barely even admits it to herself, focusing instead on her grueling hours as a surgical resident. She’s ready for a vacation at her happy place—the Maine cottage she and her friends visit every summer. But (surprise!) Wyn is there too, and he and Harriet have to share a (very romantic) room and a bed. Telling the truth about their breakup is out of the question, because the cottage is up for sale, and this is the group’s last hurrah. Determined to make sure everyone has the perfect last trip, Harriet and Wyn resolve to fake their relationship for the week. The problem with this plan, of course, is that Harriet still has major feelings for Wyn—feelings that only get stronger as they pretend to be blissfully in love. As always, Henry’s dialogue is sparkling and the banter between characters is snappy and hilarious. Wyn and Harriet’s relationship, shown both in the past and the present, feels achingly real. Their breakup, as well as their complicated relationships with their own families, adds a twinge of melancholy, as do the relatable growing pains of a group of friends whose lives are taking them in different directions.

Pub Date: April 25, 2023

ISBN: 9780593441275

Page Count: 400

Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | GENERAL FICTION

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BookBrowse Reviews The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reading Guide  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

The Personal Librarian

by Marie Benedict , Victoria Christopher Murray

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• Historical Fiction
• Mid-Atlantic, USA
• New York State
• Early 20th Century
• Black Authors
• Strong Women
• Books about Books
• Top 20 Best Books of 2021

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A fictional glimpse into the life of Belle da Costa Greene, a Black woman passing as white who managed banker J.P. Morgan's private library.

The Personal Librarian drew a robust positive response from our First Impressions reviewers, receiving a rating of 4 or 5 stars from 70 out of 77 readers. The book is a collaboration between the novelists Marie Benedict and Victoria Murray. What the book is about: The fascinating story of Belle da Costa Greene begins for the reader in 1905. She went from working at the library at Princeton University to becoming the personal librarian to J.P. Morgan. Even though her father was the first African American man to graduate from Harvard University, she lived her whole life as a white woman (Elizabeth K). The story provides a fascinating look at the process of building and collecting a library of rare books, manuscripts and art. But, it is also the story of a beautiful, intelligent and witty black woman, living as white (Sherilyn R). Readers enjoyed peering into the world of art and antiquities in early-1900s New York high society. The characters with whom Belle mingles have volumes written about them — Vanderbilt, Elsie de Wolfe, Lillian Russell, Oscar Wilde, Steichen, Stieglitz, Bernard Berenson and of course the collector himself, J.P. Morgan (Margaret S). I found the book to be particularly interesting in the descriptions of the sumptuousness of the library, the fashions of the time, the paintings and other artifacts owned by the Morgans and their friends, and the preciousness of the manuscripts and tomes sought for the collection (Dorinne D). Many were pleased to discover a captivating protagonist based on a fascinating real-life figure. I came to love the heroine's balance of professional chutzpah and vulnerable heart (Jessamyn R). Belle da Costa Greene was, historically, a very powerful woman and yet has never crossed my radar. The authors describe a woman of great intelligence, style and depth one can never know enough about (Carole A). This portrayal of the diminutive (in stature only) Greene and her ability to navigate a purely (white) man's world with her wit, tenacity and intelligence is unforgettable (Patricia L). Some felt the book dragged at times despite its interesting characters and subject matter. I felt that the characters were well-drawn, but thought that the book moved very slowly from major issue to major issue without sufficient build-up to propel the story forward (Erica M). The style of writing in this book reflects the restricted customs and repressed emotions... which makes it a slower and perhaps less exciting read (Karen W). However, readers saw the novel's great potential for stimulating book club discussions, with some suggesting it would pair well with Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half . This book is an interesting counterpoint to The Vanishing Half , since the time and financial status are so different (Karen W). Coincidentally, both of my book groups had just finished reading and discussing The Vanishing Half . Hours could be spent discussing these two books together, even though they are different in many ways. This is a terrific book club book (Marianne D). Ultimately, reviewers felt that The Personal Librarian is an important work for its social and political context, with many layers that make it worth the read. Focusing on both racial and gender rights in the first half of the 20th century, the story line shows both the progress we've made and the work still ahead. I feel certain that both book clubs I'm involved in — one for women only and the other for both men and women — would be pleased with this selection (Patricia E). The Personal Librarian not only shows us how far we have come in our struggle against racial inequality and injustice, but also reminds us how much more is left to be done. ... It's a great story and the discussion possibilities are endless (Christine P).

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J.P. Morgan’s librarian hid her race. A novel imagines the toll on her.

• Deep Read ( 4 Min. )
• By Heller McAlpin Correspondent

June 29, 2021

At the turn of the 20th century, light-skinned Black people sometimes chose to “pass” as white to enhance their prospects in the face of legally sanctioned racial discrimination in America.

In the case of Belle da Costa Greene, her mother was willing to break ties with extended family and even become estranged from her husband so that her children could advance. Although often mistaken for a white man, he believed that all Black people should unite to fight against prejudice rather than “trying to cross the color line.”

Why We Wrote This

How much would you be willing to sacrifice in order to advance? At the turn of the 20th century, some Black people chose to “pass” as white in a bid to circumvent racism and segregation.

Told from Greene’s perspective, “The Personal Librarian” deftly conveys her deep knowledge of medieval illuminated manuscripts; her skill in handling her mercurial, overbearing boss, J.P. Morgan; and her prowess in navigating the rarefied circles of art dealers and Gilded Age society. But the book never loses sight of the cost incurred by her family secret through all these professional triumphs.

Although Greene has been written about before, “The Personal Librarian” introduces her story to a wider audience.

Some books leave you wondering why the author has chosen to tell this particular story, and why now. This is emphatically not the case with “The Personal Librarian,” a novel about the woman who helped shape the Morgan Library’s spectacular collection of rare books and art more than a century ago. It quickly becomes clear why two popular authors, Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, have teamed up to tell this important, inspirational story. 

Belle da Costa Greene’s success in the almost exclusively male world of art and rare book dealers was an unusual feat for a woman in the early 20th century. But what makes it even more extraordinary – and such rich material for historical fiction – is the secret she harbored throughout her long career: She hailed from a prominent, light-skinned Black family, many of whose members had chosen to pass as white. 

“The Personal Librarian” reminds readers that this decision was not made lightly. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act in 1883 – a ruling that ushered in Jim Crow segregation and gave white supremacy and racial discrimination legal cover, the ramifications of which are felt to this day – few opportunities were open to anyone classified as nonwhite.

For Greene’s pragmatic mother, Genevieve Fleet Greener, passing as white became the best option to enhance her children’s prospects in an increasingly segregated, racist America – even though it meant breaking ties with her close-knit family in Washington. Worse, it meant estrangement from her husband, Richard Greener – a professor of law and prominent advocate for civil rights who was the first Black graduate of Harvard University. Although often mistaken for a white man, he believed that all Black people should unite to fight against prejudice rather than “trying to cross the color line.”

To explain her olive complexion, “da Costa” was added to Greene’s altered surname to represent an invented Portuguese grandmother. She was still in her 20s when J. Pierpont Morgan – imposing business magnate, passionate bibliophile, and known philanderer – hired her away from Princeton University’s rare books collection in 1905 to curate his new library in Manhattan. 

Told from Greene’s perspective, “The Personal Librarian” deftly conveys her deep knowledge of medieval illuminated manuscripts, her skill in handling her mercurial, overbearing boss, and her prowess in navigating the rarefied circles of art dealers and Gilded Age society. But the book never loses sight of the cost incurred by her family secret through all these professional triumphs. 

Stories about racial passing have long been fixtures of American literature, including Nella Larsen’s novel “Passing” (1929), Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain” (2000), and Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half” (2020). These books, along with Bliss Broyard’s memoir, “One Drop” (2007) – which grew from her discovery that her father, literary critic Anatole Broyard, had a hidden multiracial history – underscore the high stakes for people who dare to cross the color line. More importantly, they highlight both the outrage and absurdity of racial prejudice.

The authors of “The Personal Librarian” make it clear that many Black people like Greene and her family owe their light skin to the sexual violence inflicted on enslaved Black women by white men. Yet later in life, and despite past and present trauma, their tenacious, accomplished heroine assesses her remarkable career, declaring, “I presented proof of the heights that colored folks could fly if untethered from racist bindings.” 

In this telling, even Greene’s father, the author of a prescient essay titled “The White Problem,” comes to respect the “life of meaning” his daughter has forged for herself. But he also holds out hope for a better future when he says, “One day, Belle, we will be able to reach back through the decades and claim you as one of our own.”

And here we are, in 2021, a year after George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing outrage and Black Lives Matter demonstrations it provoked, reading about the true heritage of J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian.

The backstory behind “The Personal Librarian” adds another intriguing dimension. Historical novelist Benedict, whose previous subjects include Lady Clementine Churchill and Hedy Lamarr, learned about Greene many years ago from a docent in the Morgan Library. But she felt she needed a collaborator, particularly for the Black perspective. She chose Victoria Christopher Murray, author of a fiction series, “The Seven Deadly Sins,” as well as “Stand Your Ground,” a sensitive contemporary novel about the shooting of a Black teenager by a white police officer. In an author’s note, Murray writes that her own light-skinned grandmother occasionally passed as white.

Their teamwork has yielded an engrossing, well-researched read, which the authors assure us is anchored in “the available facts.” Liberties have, of course, been taken, and it’s mostly in these imagined scenes of high drama – such as the physical tension between Greene and her possessive, much older boss – that the writing often feels overheated.

The prose turns positively purple when it comes to Greene’s affair with art historian Bernard Berenson, a Lithuanian-born Jew who passed himself off as a Boston Brahmin. (He does not come across well.) Air and voices grow “thick with emotion” to connote sexual desire. Other, smaller stumbling blocks include anachronistic expressions like “it came with the territory,” “I feel seen,” and “compartmentalizing my sadness.”

That said, Greene is an inspiring, compelling heroine. Although she has been written about before – most notably in Heidi Ardizzone’s biography, “An Illuminated Life: Belle Da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege” (2007) – one hopes that “The Personal Librarian” will introduce her story to a wider audience. 

In addition to the Monitor, Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times.

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The Personal Librarian

By marie benedict and victoria murray.

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Murray, a historical fiction novel about the black woman who became J. P. Morgan's personal librarian.

The Personal Librarian tells the story of Belle da Costa Greene, who is hired by J. P. Morgan to serve as the curator and librarian of his newly-constructed library, the Pierpont Morgan Library. As she acquires valuable works and becomes a society darling, she worries about keeping her secret -- that she's a black woman passing as white.

In this story about a truly unique woman, Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray have offers a narrative about a woman finding her place in a world where she must hide her true identity.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

The one-paragraph version: Belle de Costa Greene is a light-skinned black woman who is passing as white. She gets a job as J. P. Morgan's personal librarian for his newly constructed Pierpont Morgan Library in 1906. Over many years, she works to acquire and curate J. P. Morgan's collection of rare and ancient works and art, and she eventually becomes indispensable to him, even required to attend family events. They have a mutual attraction, but she decides against pursuing it. When Mr. Morgan passes away in 1913, he provides for Belle in his will, and she stays on as librarian. The book ends with Belle successfully convincing Jack (J. P. Morgan's son) to make the library public in the early 1920's.

Belle de Costa Greene is a light-skinned black woman who is passing as white. Her birth name is Belle Marion Greener . She is the daughter of Genevieve Fleet , woman from a prominent black family, and Richard Greener , a civil rights activist. Belle's parents separated because of Genevieve's decision to have their family pass as white. Belle is working at as a librarian at Princeton University when the cousin of infamous banker J. P. Morgan refers her for a job as J. P. Morgan's personal librarian for his newly-constructed Pierpont Morgan Library .

Belle starts the job in 1906, moving back to New York to live with her mother and siblings, all of whom are also passing as white. Over time, Belle gains the trust of Mr. Morgan and greater responsibilities. As she makes major acquisitions, it raises Belle's profile when she is featured in newspaper articles as a woman succeeding in an entirely male industry and building up an impressive collection of works. Belle is flirtatious and ostentatious, which makes her a society darling. The job also improves the financial security of her family as Belle is given multiple raises.

However, Mr. Morgan's daughter Anne Morgan continues to be wary of Belle. On multiple occasions, she asks Belle about rumors about her heritage (Belle claims to be of Portuguese descent). To fend her off, Belle counters by saying that she has also heard rumors about Anne -- that Anne is in a relationship with two other women, Miss Elsie de Wolfe and Miss Bessie Marbury .

Through her job, Belle meets Bernard Berenson, who wrote a book of art history that Belle's father had gifted her as a child. Though he is older than her, married and lives in Italy, Belle finds herself attracted to Bernard. When she learns that he's in an open marriage, Belle allows herself to pursue a romance with him. Eventually, however, when she's on a work trip to Europe, she becomes pregnant by him. He demands that she get an abortion. When it goes poorly and she is hospitalized for two days, he doesn't go to see her. Belle returns to New York heartbroken.

When Belle's grandmother on her mom's side dies, they finally go back to D.C., where the Fleet family lives, for a visit. For a long time now, they've had to stay away in order to distance themselves from their black ancestry. Later, Belle learns that her mother wasn't always set on passing as white. Belle's father Richard had been hired as a professor at a newly-integrated university when they were younger. They both became involved in activism for equal rights upon seeing the resistance people had to being de-segregated. However, eventually most Reconstruction-era policies were dismantled. The university went back to being whites-only, and Richard and Genevieve left with people spitting and throwing garbage at them. It was that experience that launched Richard's civil rights career, but it also led Genevieve to believe that the only way to survive was to take advantage of their light skin and pass as white.

In present day, since she began working for him, Mr. Morgan's most desired work had been the William Caxton edition of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur . When Belle finally acquires it in 1911, they both give into their mutual attraction and share a kiss. However, Belle decides that a romantic relationship is not a good idea, given Mr. Morgan's history of cycling through mistresses. Afterwards, it causes her relationship with him to change as he becomes increasingly needy and jealous.

In 1913, Mr. Morgan passes away. He leaves Belle $50,000, which is enough to provide financial security for her family for the rest of their lives. After Mr. Morgan's death, his son Jack takes over the running of the library. Jack recognizes how valuable Belle has been for the library and keeps her on as librarian. Additionally, Anne's paramour Bessie encourages Anne to accept Belle, and Anne makes her peace with Belle.

Belle briefly reconnects with her father, and she tells him about her conflicting feelings about passing as white. But he recognizes that doing so allows her to do meaningful work, and he encourages to stay on her path if it allows her to keep doing it. Belle then starts to think about her legacy and how turning the library from a private collection into a public institution would make her work more meaningful. Meanwhile, Belle has been seeing Bernard again, but ends up realizing how selfish and uncaring he has been towards her and breaks things off with him.

The book ends with Belle successfully convincing Jack to make the library public. Many years later, as she burns all her records (to protect her identity and her life's work by extension), she wonders if people will someday learn that the personal librarian to J. P. Morgan was a black woman.

For more detail, see the full Section-by-Section Summary .

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Book Review

The Personal Librarian tells the story of Belle de Costa Greene, a black woman who became the personal librarian to the famed banker J. P. Morgan by passing as white. While the book is historical fiction, Belle de Costa Greene was a real person who managed to achieve a status in society that was noteworthy, even if she didn’t have to overcome the limits of race.

Authored by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, The Personal Library draws from a lot of historical events and pulls in many real-life details about Belle’s life. There’s clearly a lot of research that went into this novel, and Belle becoming so successful as a black woman in a white male field is an innately interesting story in and of itself.

An Artist’s Sketch of Belle de Costa Greene

That said, the book as a whole is a little slow-going. The actual story running through it is a bit sparse, likely due to a lack of sufficient detail about Belle’s life, so it gets spread out fairly thin throughout the book. I don’t doubt that Belle was a fascinating woman in person, but in some parts of the book it felt like the writers were struggling to put together enough of a storyline to make it into a book.

Read it or Skip it?

I think lovers of historical fiction who don’t mind reading a somewhat leisurely-paced novel will enjoy this book. The book did go by a little slowly for my tastes, but overall it represents such a unique little slice of history that I enjoyed it all the same.

This is definitely one where I’d recommend reading the Historical Notes at the end if you’re going to read it!

See The Personal Librarian on Amazon.

The Personal Librarian Audiobook

Narrated by : Robin Miles Length : 12 hours 22 minutes

Hear a sample of The Personal Librarian audiobook on Libro.fm.

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of The Personal Librarian

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In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collection.

But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle’s complexion isn’t dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white—her complexion is dark because she is African American.

The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths she must go to—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.

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'Personal Librarian' tells pioneer's tale through mix of fact and fiction

Personal Librarian 

Authors: Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray 

Berkley, 347 pages, $27 

Imagine being a young woman in the early 1900s with the moxie to convince the American titan of industry and finance, J.P. Morgan, to hire you as his personal librarian over candidates with stronger credentials. Imagine this young woman is a light-skinned Black American passing herself off as white. 

This is the premise of the recently-published historical novel, “Personal Librarian,” by bestselling authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. With meticulous research, the authors have created a fictionalized, intimate portrait of the real-life Belle da Costa Greene, a person you’ve probably never heard of. In her time — early to mid-20th century — she was famous and celebrated in the international world of fine art and rare books. How she accomplished this is told through a seamless blending of fact and fiction that kept me hooked throughout the reading. 

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

At the age of 20, Belle’s life began in earnest when she was introduced to the fierce and fabulously wealthy Morgan by his nephew. At her mother’s urging and to her father’s dismay, Belle elected to discard her real name, Belle Marion Greener, for the pseudonym she lived with for the rest of her life. This was not a capricious move. In Belle’s time gender bias and racism were especially rampant, certainly in the rarified circles in which Morgan moved. His was a world apart from Belle’s true heritage, though she hailed from an educated family (her father was the first Black American Harvard graduate) and she herself was college-educated. 

While social issues are a thread of this book, the main thrust is the life Belle made for herself through her wit, intelligence, and single-minded determination to succeed at all costs. There were costs. Her father, a civil rights activist whom she dearly loved, abandoned Belle, her mother and siblings after they decided to live as a white family. Belle had to guard every word, move and emotion to avoid betraying her true ethnicity and ending a life and financial prosperity few people — Black or white — had achieved in that time. 

When Belle first met Morgan he owned a large collection of rare manuscripts, books and artwork. He hired Belle to organize and expand these works into a world-class Pierpont Morgan Library. His ambition was boundless, as was his wallet. Belle soon proved herself by acquiring priceless ancient works in New York, London and Paris out from under the noses of battle-hardened brokers and dealers — all older men. Over time she became accepted and acclaimed in these circles and she adopted upper-class style and demeanor. Morgan gave her more and more responsibility and came to depend on her. The book suggests there was no intimate relationship between them, though there were temptations on both sides. 

Belle stayed with the library after Morgan’s death in 1913 and, working with his son, ultimately transformed the private library into a public treasure of fine art, literature and music which remains on Madison Avenue in New York to this day. 

I highly recommend this book to those who enjoy superbly researched and written historical fiction, especially the depiction of life in America in the early 1900s. This book is an excellent read for fans of stories of women who have struggled and triumphed against all odds. 

Jacksonville author Claudia N. Oltean (“Media Skills — The Lawyer as Spokesperson”) is working on a two-book historical fiction series set during Prohibition. 

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Book Review: The Personal Librarian

In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene was hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City.

Belle became a fixture on the New York society scene and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helped build a world-class, renowned collection.

But Belle had a secret that she protected at all costs. She was born Belle Marion Greener. She was the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle’s complexion wasn’t dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage. Her complexion was dark because she was African American. And she passed as white.

Remarkably, Belle became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true.

And until now, few knew the true story of the extraordinary woman who became famous for her intellect, style, and wit. Or the lengths to which she went to protect her family and her legacy — to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lived.

Benedict relates that Belle literally “haunted” her for decades. Learning about her history caused Benedict to wonder, “What must it have been like to be Belle de Costa Greene?” She wanted to write about Belle, but “knew that it wasn’t right, proper or appropriate for me to try to envision what that must have been like.” As a white woman, Benedict acknowledged that she was incapable of perceiving what it was like to be an African American woman in the United States when slavery had been abolished but white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, and lynchings were escalating. Much less put herself in the place of a woman trying to pass as white as her own father worked to create a world where all people “could live freely while openly celebrating their heritage.” Indeed, Benedict felt strongly that “Belle deserved to have her story told by an African American author.”

Benedict hoped she had found a writing partner when she read Stand Your Ground by Victoria Christopher Murray . Eventually, Murray, who also left a decade-long career in the corporate world and was the author of more than thirty books, agreed to collaborate. The two women had just begun editing their manuscript when COVID-19 shut the world down. And then came a summer of protests following the murder of George Floyd. Benedict and Murray had candid, intimate conversations about race and the ongoing struggle for equality in America that changed not only the final version of The Personal Librarian , but both authors. Benedict says their friendship showed her how little she knew about the struggles of African Americans. “I realized how removed I had been, how protected by my own white privilege I really was. And how much I had to learn and how much i had to do .”

As for Murray, it took her some time to see that combining her talent as a contemporary writer with a historical fiction author was, in fact, “a fit.” She too became fascinated by Belle’s story, but for different reasons. Her own grandmother shared tales about “occasionally passing out of necessity or to make life easier.” So she felt that she “knew Belle from my own familial experiences.” Unlike Benedict, Murray “ could imagine how every day, once she walked outside of her doors, she had to put on an award-winning performance, but then, at night when she returned home, took off her ‘costume,’ and laid her head down, she was still Black.” Still, she Murray didn’t believe Belle’s story could be told completely without a white woman “because she lived as white.”

Happily, once Murray and Benedict connected, they were soon “finishing each other’s sentences.” Still, like Benedict, Murray could not have foreseen that “as a disease threatened our bodies and civil unrest challenged our souls Marie and I would bond far beyond the experience of writing together.” As they researched, wrote, and edited, they “created a safe space” in which to talk about “the history of Black America, the history of white America, and the hope that one day these two Americas would converge into one.”

The result of their partnership is a seamlessly related and meticulously crafted fictionalized account of the life of a woman who presented one identity to the world while hiding her true self because she “didn’t want the color of her skin to be used as a weapon against her, an excuse to keep her relegated to the lowest jobs, the worst neighborhoods, with little possibility for a better life.” The Personal Librarian is a poignant, engrossing, timely and timeless story about the lengths to which one woman would go in order to rise above the constraints society placed on her and her family.

Belle’s story is told via a first-person narrative, making it powerful and impactful. Benedict and Murray meticulously researched their subject but Belle was, of necessity and purposefully, intensely private. Based on the information available to them, Benedict and Murray have believably imagined and crafted conversations, as well as Belle’s inner dialogue as she navigates the world. Belle was determined to succeed in a world designed to hold her back. Clever, calculating, witty, and beautiful, Belle was adept at using all of her assets to her advantage. She had to be. Because everything was at stake. And not just for her, but for her entire family because she supported them financially, enabling them to move to increasingly more comfortable apartments as Morgan generously increased her salary when she successfully procured the pieces he desired and elevated the library’s stature.

I accepted my mother’s decision as if it were my own and I became the white woman known as Belle da Costa Greene.

Belle’s father was not only the first Black graduate of Harvard University. He was also an activist, a contemporary of Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, and Booker T. Washington, known for his oration. But Belle’s mother “saw the writing on the wall.” When politicians began dismantling Reconstruction, her father lost his job as the first Black professor at the integrated University of South Carolina and the school was converted to a whites-only private men’s college. She explains to Belle, “Your father and I lived through a brief, fleeting time in history when equality might have been possible.” But the “lofty postwar ideal of integration” evaporated, the world comprised only of “black and white, two races separated, but certainly not equally.” She recognized what Belle’s father refused to: “Our only hope would be to live as white.” And so they did.

But when Belle’s mother reported to a 1905 census worker that the family was white, her father was infuriated to the breaking point and left. “Once she made the decision that they were going to live as white, she changed their names, she told them how they had to behave and, from the age of sixteen on, Belle was walking the footsteps her mother laid out for her,” explains Murray. Indeed, throughout the book, Belle is “walking a tightrope” and struggling to reconcile her guilt with her ambition. She “felt that she was betraying her father but also helping black people.” Belle secretly knew that her achievements were, in fact, the achievements of a a woman but, more particularly, a Black woman. Even if the world did not. Yet.

Belle was a woman compiling a vast and priceless collection of rare books, manuscripts, and art, an unparalleled accomplishment. She traveled abroad and skillfully negotiated to purchase artifacts she deemed necessary to elevate the library to unmatched esteem. But she did so in the employ of J. P. Morgan (1837-1913), a man of vast wealth and power who financed railroads and helped organize U.S. Steel, General Electric, and other major corporations. He was demanding and unforgiving, an anti-Semite who reminded Belle that she was his personal librarian, sometimes treating her like she was yet another of his possessions. Or worse, in Belle’s mind, a slave. They disagreed and quarreled, but she strove to avoid angering or embarrassing him, aware that he would fire her instantly were her secret revealed, bringing ruin upon her entire family. Belle revered him and he was drawn to her — based on their research, Benedict and Murray suggest a sexual tension between them. He came to consider her the most important person in his life, providing generously for her in his will.

Benedict and Murray effectively portray the evolution of their complex relationship, as well as Belle’s interactions with Morgan’s mistresses and children, especially his daughter Anne. Unmarried, Anne was rumored to be in a “Boston marriage,” a euphemism for wealthy women who chose to eschew marriage to live independently and, perhaps, enjoy an intimate relationship. Their fractious encounters cause Belle concern, especially when Anne makes references to her “people,” and questions her background, snidely telling Belle, “I though I heard something about your family having tropical roots.” Belle shrewdly leverages the rumors about Anne to her advantage and relates the story that Belle’s mother devised about Belle’s grandmother hailing from Portugal to explain Belle’s olive skin tone. It appeases Anne for a time, as it does others who inquires.

Belle never married, but she did have a decades-long relationship with Bernard Berenson, an expert on Renaissance-era art, which is explored in depth. It is both a heartbreaking and empowering aspect of Belle’s life, as depicted by the authors. As a young woman, Belle was forced to accept that marriage and motherhood would not be in her future. She says, “I’ve always known that, because of my heritage, a traditional relationship would not be possible for me … because a marriage means children, and that is something I cannot hazard. Without the fairer skin of my siblings, I could never risk bearing a child whose skin color might reveal my deception.” But Belle wanted to experience love and romance, and in Benedict and Murray’s telling of the story, although she had other lovers, she gets the opportunity to feel loved through Berenson, a man in an unconventional marriage with other secrets of his own. Like her relationship with Morgan, Belle’s affair with Berenson changes her profoundly.

Of all of her accomplishments, the one that mattered most to Belle was making two men proud of her — Morgan and her father — for very different reasons. Her father’s departure from the family impacted Belle deeply because of their close relationship and his tutelage about art and other subjects. Eventually, because of her notoriety, Belle dares not be seen with him in New York, so she is not able to personally show him her life’s work. She knows his words are true: “Changing your name is easy. Changing your soul is impossible.” She dreams of reinventing herself yet again and ponders coming forward with the truth in order to serve as an example to other Black people. But she never did.

The Personal Librarian is Belle’s story, told in a compelling, engrossing, and richly moving manner that provides insight into and appreciation for Belle’s triumphs, as well as sacrifices, as she strove to achieve her goals in the only way possible to her at the time. As he father tells her in a conversation imagined by Benedict and Murray, “One day, Belle, we will be able to reach back through the decades and claim you as one of our own. Your accomplishments will be part of history, they’ll show doubtful white people what colored can do. Until that time, live your life proudly.”

Benedict and Murray hope that readers, especially book club members, will reach out to each other and use the book to launch conversations about race in a way that feels safe.

Excerpt from The Personal Librarian

November 28, 1905

Princeton, New Jersey

The Old North bell tolls the hour, and I realize that I’ll be late. I long to break into a sprint, my voluminous skirts lifted, my legs flying along the Princeton University pathways. But just as I gather the heavy material, I hear Mama’s voice: Belle, be a lady at all times. I sigh; a lady would never run.

I release the fabric and slow down as I weave through Princeton’s leafy Gothic landscape, designed to look like Cambridge and Oxford. I know I must do nothing to draw any kind of extra attention. By the time I pass Blair Arch, my stride is quick but acceptable for a lady.

It’s been five years since I left our New York City apartment for this sleepy New Jersey college town, and the quiet is still unnerving. On the weekends, I wish I could return to the energy of New York, but the sixty cents for a train ticket is outside our family’s budget. So, I send money home instead.

As I duck under a crenellated tower, I moderate my pace so I won’t be breathless when I arrive. You are at Princeton University. You must take extra care working at that all-male institution. Be cautious, never do anything to stand out. Even though she’s nearly sixty miles away, Mama insinuates herself into my thoughts.

Pushing the heavy oak door slowly to minimize its loud creak, I pad as quietly as my calfskin boots allow, across the marble foyer before I sidle into the office I share with two other librarians. The room is empty, and I exhale in relief. If sweet-natured Miss McKenna saw me arrive late, it would have been of no import, but with hood-eyed, nosy Miss Adams, I could never be certain she wouldn’t mention my offense at some future time to our superior.

I remove my coat and hat, careful to smooth my rebellious curly hair back into place. Tucking my somber navy skirt beneath me, I slide onto my chair. Within minutes, the office door flies open, slamming against the wood-paneled wall, and I jump. It is my only dear friend, fellow librarian, and housemate, Gertrude Hyde. As the niece of the esteemed head of purchasing for the library, Charlotte Martins, she can breach the quiet of the library’s hallowed halls without fear of repercussions. An ebullient twenty-three-year-old with ginger hair and bright eyes, no one makes me laugh as she does.

“Sorry to make you jump, dear Belle. I guess I owe you two apologies now, instead of the single one I’d intended. First, we abandoned you this morning, which undoubtedly led to your lateness,” she says with a mischievous smile and a glance at the wall clock, “and now, I’ve given you a fright.”

“Don’t be silly. The fault is mine. I should have put aside that letter to my mother and walked to campus with you and Charlotte. Miss Martins, I mean,” I correct myself.

Most days, Charlotte, Gertrude, and I walk together from their large family home on University Drive, where I have a room and share meals with Charlotte, Gertrude, and the rest of their family who live in the house as well. From the first, Charlotte and Gertrude have welcomed me into their home and social circles with warmth and generosity and have provided me with abundant guidance at work. I cannot imagine what my time in Princeton would have been like without them.

“Belle, why are you fussing about what to call Aunt Charlotte? There’s nobody in here but you and me,” Gertrude mock scolds me.

I don’t say what I’m thinking. That Gertrude doesn’t need to assess every single moment of every single day against societal standards to ensure her behavior passes muster. She has no need to analyze her words, her walk, her manner, but I do. Even with Gertrude, I must act with care, particularly given the heightened scrutiny in this university town, which operates as if it lies in the segregated South rather than in the supposedly more progressive North.

The distinctive clip of Miss Adams’s shoes sounds in the hallway outside my office door, and Gertrude’s skirt rustles as she moves to leave. She has as much fondness for my office mate as I do, and she’ll skedaddle before she can get locked into a conversation.

Before she exits the office altogether, she turns back to me, whispering, “Are you still free for the philosophy lecture tonight?”

Since Woodrow Wilson assumed the presidency of Princeton University three years ago and instituted all sorts of scholastic reform, the number of lectures open to staff and members of the community has increased. While Gertrude and I revel in being included in the academic life of the campus, I loathe certain of Wilson’s other decisions, such as maintaining Princeton as a whites-only university when all the other Ivy League schools have admitted colored folks. But I would never voice aloud these views.

Instead, I say, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

The quiet of the stacks wraps around me like a soft blanket. I relax into the subdued hush of patrons turning pages and the scent of leather bindings. My long days spent in the company of medieval manuscripts and early printed books calm and delight me. Imagining the labors of the first printing press users as they memorialized the English language and broadly disseminated its literature through the meticulous work of placing the type letter by letter, transforming empty pages into beautiful text to inspire worshippers and readers, transports me beyond the limitations of this time and place, just as Papa always believed. To him, the written word could act as an invitation to free thought and the broader world, and nowhere was that more true than in the dawn of the printed word, where—for the first time—that invitation could be made to the masses instead of a select few.

“Miss Greene.” I hear a soft voice from beyond the stacks.

Two simple words, but my visitor’s modulated tone and distinctive accent give him away, and anyway, I’ve been waiting for him.

“Good day, Mr. Morgan,” I reply, turning in his direction.

Even though I’m talking softly, Miss Scott glances up from the circulation desk with a disapproving scowl. It isn’t so much the volume of my speech as the pleasantness of my relationship with the fellow librarian and collection benefactor that vexes her.

While Mr. Junius Morgan is ostensibly a banker, he has generously donated dozens of ancient and medieval manuscripts to the university, which is why he also holds the titular position of associate head librarian. I’m convinced that Miss Scott thinks any sort of relationship between us—even the cordial, professional one we share—is beneath him.

A slight man, with wispy brown hair and a kindly expression behind his circular glasses, materializes. “How are you today, Miss Greene?”

“Well, sir. And yourself?” My tone is professional and reserved. He’s twenty minutes later than the time we’d mentioned, and I’d begun to think he’d forgotten about our appointment. But I would never dare mention his tardiness.

“I was going to take a gander at the Virgils, as we discussed yesterday. I wonder if you’d still care to accompany me. Assuming your duties and your interest permit, of course.”

Mr. Morgan, whom I think of as Junius in the privacy of my thoughts, knows that my zeal for the library’s most valuable collection is nearly as intense as his own and that none of my other tasks will stand in the way of the private viewing he has promised.

We share a passion for the ancient Roman poet Virgil. The library houses fifty-two volumes of his poetry. My discussions with Junius about the dark voyages in The Aeneid and The Odyssey are some of the brightest moments in my days. While Junius admires Odysseus, I identify always with Aeneas, the Trojan refugee who desperately tries to fulfill his destiny in a world that holds no place for him. Aeneas was driven by duty, sacrificing for the good of others.

“I have cleared my schedule, sir.” I smile.

“Wonderful. If you’ll follow me.”

My skirts swish the oak floor as I follow Junius to the small, elegant room where the Virgils are housed. I have to inhale and restrain my foot from tapping as I wait for him to fish out a heavy key ring from his pocket.

Finally, he pushes the door open to reveal the glass cases holding the precious collection of rare books. There are only about one hundred and fifty printed books of Virgil’s poetry in existence. These volumes were all printed in the fifteenth century. Most of them have been donated by Junius.

I’ve seen these books only a few times before, while in the company of the restoration team. This is a holy moment.

Mr. Morgan’s voice worms its way into the sanctity of my thoughts. “Would you care to hold my favorite?”

Junius is carrying the Sweynheym and Pannartz copy of Virgil, the rarest of all the books. German clerics Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz were two of the first users of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and the book he’s proffering is one of their press’s very first editions.

“May I?” I ask, incredulous at this opportunity.

“Of course.” His eyes are bright behind his spectacles. I suspect it’s a thrill for him to share his prize with one who cares equally about it.

I slide the proffered white gloves onto my hands. The book is heavier than I expected. I sit before its open pages. How Papa would have relished this moment. I think of my father, who introduced me to the rarefied world of art and manuscripts when I was only a girl.

One day, the beauty of your mind and the beauty of art will be as one, Papa had said once.

The memory of Papa’s words makes me smile as I turn the yellowed pages. I examine the hand-detailed letter T that marks the beginning of a page, marveling at the luster of its gold leaf. I am oblivious to Junius’s presence near me until he begins talking.

“I saw my uncle last evening.”

Junius doesn’t need to identify who his uncle is. Everyone at the library knows he is the nephew of the infamous financier J. P. Morgan, which is exactly why I never mention him. I want Junius to understand that I appreciate him for his erudition alone.

“Ah?” I answer politely, never moving my eyes from the page.

“Yes, at the Grolier Club.”

I know the club he speaks of, by reputation anyway. Founded about twenty years ago, in 1884, the private club consists of moneyed bibliophiles whose main aim is to promote the scholarship and collection of books. I would adore a peek behind the closed doors of its Romanesque townhouse on East Thirty-Second Street. But as a woman, I’d never be admitted, and to those men, my gender would not be my only sin.

“Were you attending an interesting lecture?” I attempt to continue making small talk.

“Actually, Miss Greene, it wasn’t the lecture that was interesting.” Junius’s tone contains a quality unusual for him, bordering on playful.

Curious, I turn away from the Virgil. Junius’s placid face, always pleasant but always serious, has cracked open wide with a smile. It is a bit disconcerting, and as I lean away a little, I wonder what on earth is going on.

“No?” I ask. “The lecture wasn’t good?”

“The lecture was fine, but the most fascinating discussion of the evening was with my uncle about his personal art and manuscript collection. I advise him about it from time to time, as well as the new library he’s constructing for it right next door to his home in New York City.”

“Oh, yes,” I say with a small nod. “Is he considering an intriguing new acquisition?”

Junius pauses for a moment before he answers. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose he is in search of a new acquisition,” he says with a knowing chuckle. “I have recommended that he interview you for his newly created post of personal librarian.”

Excerpted from The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. Copyright © 2021 by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. Excerpted by permission of Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

Disclosure of material connection: i received one electronic copy of the personal librarian free of charge from the author via net galley . i was not required to write a positive review in exchange for receipt of the book; rather, the opinions expressed in this review are my own. this disclosure complies with 16 code of federal regulations, part 255, guides concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising., related posts.

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The story is fascinating. A bit difficult for me to understand from overseas but still very intriguing. Thank you for the review.

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The Personal Librarian: A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel) Hardcover – June 29, 2021

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• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Berkley
• Publication date June 29, 2021
• Dimensions 6.35 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
• ISBN-10 0593101537
• ISBN-13 978-0593101537
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Editorial reviews, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

November 28, 1905

Princeton, New Jersey

The Old North bell tolls the hour, and I realize that I'll be late. I long to break into a sprint, my voluminous skirts lifted, my legs flying along the Princeton University pathways. But just as I gather the heavy material, I hear Mama's voice: Belle, be a lady at all times. I sigh; a lady would never run.

I release the fabric and slow down as I weave through Princeton's leafy Gothic landscape, designed to look like Cambridge and Oxford. I know I must do nothing to draw any kind of extra attention. By the time I pass Blair Arch, my stride is quick but acceptable for a lady.

It's been five years since I left our New York City apartment for this sleepy New Jersey college town, and the quiet is still unnerving. On the weekends, I wish I could return to the energy of New York, but the sixty cents for a train ticket is outside our family's budget. So, I send money home instead.

As I duck under a crenellated tower, I moderate my pace so I won't be breathless when I arrive. You are at Princeton University. You must take extra care working at that all-male institution. Be cautious, never do anything to stand out. Even though she's nearly sixty miles away, Mama insinuates herself into my thoughts.

Pushing the heavy oak door slowly to minimize its loud creak, I pad as quietly as my calfskin boots allow, across the marble foyer before I sidle into the office I share with two other librarians. The room is empty, and I exhale in relief. If sweet-natured Miss McKenna saw me arrive late, it would have been of no import, but with hood-eyed, nosy Miss Adams, I could never be certain she wouldn't mention my offense at some future time to our superior.

I remove my coat and hat, careful to smooth my rebellious curly hair back into place. Tucking my somber navy skirt beneath me, I slide onto my chair. Within minutes, the office door flies open, slamming against the wood-paneled wall, and I jump. It is my only dear friend, fellow librarian, and housemate, Gertrude Hyde. As the niece of the esteemed head of purchasing for the library, Charlotte Martins, she can breach the quiet of the library's hallowed halls without fear of repercussions. An ebullient twenty-three-year-old with ginger hair and bright eyes, no one makes me laugh as she does.

"Sorry to make you jump, dear Belle. I guess I owe you two apologies now, instead of the single one I'd intended. First, we abandoned you this morning, which undoubtedly led to your lateness," she says with a mischievous smile and a glance at the wall clock, "and now, I've given you a fright."

"Don't be silly. The fault is mine. I should have put aside that letter to my mother and walked to campus with you and Charlotte. Miss Martins, I mean," I correct myself.

Most days, Charlotte, Gertrude, and I walk together from their large family home on University Drive, where I have a room and share meals with Charlotte, Gertrude, and the rest of their family who live in the house as well. From the first, Charlotte and Gertrude have welcomed me into their home and social circles with warmth and generosity and have provided me with abundant guidance at work. I cannot imagine what my time in Princeton would have been like without them.

"Belle, why are you fussing about what to call Aunt Charlotte? There's nobody in here but you and me," Gertrude mock scolds me.

I don't say what I'm thinking. That Gertrude doesn't need to assess every single moment of every single day against societal standards to ensure her behavior passes muster. She has no need to analyze her words, her walk, her manner, but I do. Even with Gertrude, I must act with care, particularly given the heightened scrutiny in this university town, which operates as if it lies in the segregated South rather than in the supposedly more progressive North.

The distinctive clip of Miss Adams's shoes sounds in the hallway outside my office door, and Gertrude's skirt rustles as she moves to leave. She has as much fondness for my office mate as I do, and she'll skedaddle before she can get locked into a conversation.

Before she exits the office altogether, she turns back to me, whispering, "Are you still free for the philosophy lecture tonight?"

Since Woodrow Wilson assumed the presidency of Princeton University three years ago and instituted all sorts of scholastic reform, the number of lectures open to staff and members of the community has increased. While Gertrude and I revel in being included in the academic life of the campus, I loathe certain of Wilson's other decisions, such as maintaining Princeton as a whites-only university when all the other Ivy League schools have admitted colored folks. But I would never voice aloud these views.

Instead, I say, "Wouldn't miss it for the world."

The quiet of the stacks wraps around me like a soft blanket. I relax into the subdued hush of patrons turning pages and the scent of leather bindings. My long days spent in the company of medieval manuscripts and early printed books calm and delight me. Imagining the labors of the first printing press users as they memorialized the English language and broadly disseminated its literature through the meticulous work of placing the type letter by letter, transforming empty pages into beautiful text to inspire worshippers and readers, transports me beyond the limitations of this time and place, just as Papa always believed. To him, the written word could act as an invitation to free thought and the broader world, and nowhere was that more true than in the dawn of the printed word, where—for the first time—that invitation could be made to the masses instead of a select few.

"Miss Greene." I hear a soft voice from beyond the stacks.

Two simple words, but my visitor's modulated tone and distinctive accent give him away, and anyway, I've been waiting for him.

"Good day, Mr. Morgan," I reply, turning in his direction.

Even though I'm talking softly, Miss Scott glances up from the circulation desk with a disapproving scowl. It isn't so much the volume of my speech as the pleasantness of my relationship with the fellow librarian and collection benefactor that vexes her.

While Mr. Junius Morgan is ostensibly a banker, he has generously donated dozens of ancient and medieval manuscripts to the university, which is why he also holds the titular position of associate head librarian. I'm convinced that Miss Scott thinks any sort of relationship between us—even the cordial, professional one we share—is beneath him.

A slight man, with wispy brown hair and a kindly expression behind his circular glasses, materializes. "How are you today, Miss Greene?"

"Well, sir. And yourself?" My tone is professional and reserved. He's twenty minutes later than the time we'd mentioned, and I'd begun to think he'd forgotten about our appointment. But I would never dare mention his tardiness.

"I was going to take a gander at the Virgils, as we discussed yesterday. I wonder if you'd still care to accompany me. Assuming your duties and your interest permit, of course."

Mr. Morgan, whom I think of as Junius in the privacy of my thoughts, knows that my zeal for the library's most valuable collection is nearly as intense as his own and that none of my other tasks will stand in the way of the private viewing he has promised.

We share a passion for the ancient Roman poet Virgil. The library houses fifty-two volumes of his poetry. My discussions with Junius about the dark voyages in The Aeneid and The Odyssey are some of the brightest moments in my days. While Junius admires Odysseus, I identify always with Aeneas, the Trojan refugee who desperately tries to fulfill his destiny in a world that holds no place for him. Aeneas was driven by duty, sacrificing for the good of others.

"I have cleared my schedule, sir." I smile.

"Wonderful. If you'll follow me."

My skirts swish the oak floor as I follow Junius to the small, elegant room where the Virgils are housed. I have to inhale and restrain my foot from tapping as I wait for him to fish out a heavy key ring from his pocket.

Finally, he pushes the door open to reveal the glass cases holding the precious collection of rare books. There are only about one hundred and fifty printed books of Virgil's poetry in existence. These volumes were all printed in the fifteenth century. Most of them have been donated by Junius.

I've seen these books only a few times before, while in the company of the restoration team. This is a holy moment.

Mr. Morgan's voice worms its way into the sanctity of my thoughts. "Would you care to hold my favorite?"

Junius is carrying the Sweynheym and Pannartz copy of Virgil, the rarest of all the books. German clerics Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz were two of the first users of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and the book he's proffering is one of their press's very first editions.

"May I?" I ask, incredulous at this opportunity.

"Of course." His eyes are bright behind his spectacles. I suspect it's a thrill for him to share his prize with one who cares equally about it.

I slide the proffered white gloves onto my hands. The book is heavier than I expected. I sit before its open pages. How Papa would have relished this moment. I think of my father, who introduced me to the rarefied world of art and manuscripts when I was only a girl.

One day, the beauty of your mind and the beauty of art will be as one, Papa had said once.

The memory of Papa's words makes me smile as I turn the yellowed pages. I examine the hand-detailed letter T that marks the beginning of a page, marveling at the luster of its gold leaf. I am oblivious to Junius's presence near me until he begins talking.

"I saw my uncle last evening."

Junius doesn't need to identify who his uncle is. Everyone at the library knows he is the nephew of the infamous financier J. P. Morgan, which is exactly why I never mention him. I want Junius to understand that I appreciate him for his erudition alone.

"Ah?" I answer politely, never moving my eyes from the page.

"Yes, at the Grolier Club."

I know the club he speaks of, by reputation anyway. Founded about twenty years ago, in 1884, the private club consists of moneyed bibliophiles whose main aim is to promote the scholarship and collection of books. I would adore a peek behind the closed doors of its Romanesque townhouse on East Thirty-Second Street. But as a woman, I'd never be admitted, and to those men, my gender would not be my only sin.

"Were you attending an interesting lecture?" I attempt to continue making small talk.

"Actually, Miss Greene, it wasn't the lecture that was interesting." Junius's tone contains a quality unusual for him, bordering on playful.

Curious, I turn away from the Virgil. Junius's placid face, always pleasant but always serious, has cracked open wide with a smile. It is a bit disconcerting, and as I lean away a little, I wonder what on earth is going on.

"No?" I ask. "The lecture wasn't good?"

"The lecture was fine, but the most fascinating discussion of the evening was with my uncle about his personal art and manuscript collection. I advise him about it from time to time, as well as the new library he's constructing for it right next door to his home in New York City."

"Oh, yes," I say with a small nod. "Is he considering an intriguing new acquisition?"

Junius pauses for a moment before he answers. "In a manner of speaking, I suppose he is in search of a new acquisition," he says with a knowing chuckle. "I have recommended that he interview you for his newly created post of personal librarian."

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Berkley; First Edition (June 29, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593101537
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593101537
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.19 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.35 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
• #41 in Biographical Historical Fiction
• #74 in Biographical Fiction (Books)
• #259 in Black & African American Women's Fiction (Books)

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About the authors

Victoria christopher murray.

Victoria Christopher Murray is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 novels. Her novels, The Personal Librarian and The First Ladies, which she co-authored with Marie Benedict were both Instant New York Times bestsellers and her novel, Stand Your Ground won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Fiction. Four of her novels, Lust, Envy, Wrath and Greed have been made into TV movies for Lifetime. Visit her at www.victoriachristophermurray.com.

Marie Benedict

​Marie Benedict is a lawyer with more than ten years' experience as a litigator at two of the country's premier law firms, who found her calling unearthing the hidden historical stories of women. Her mission is to excavate from the past the most important, complex and fascinating women of history and bring them into the light of present-day where we can finally perceive the breadth of their contributions as well as the insights they bring to modern day issues. She embarked on a new, thematically connected series of historical novels with THE OTHER EINSTEIN, which tells the tale of Albert Einstein's first wife, a physicist herself, and the role she might have played in his theories. The next novel in this series is the USA Today bestselling CARNEGIE'S MAID -- which released in January of 2018 -- and the book that followed is the New York Times bestseller and Barnes & Noble Book Club Pick THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM, the story of the brilliant inventor Hedy Lamarr, which published in January of 2019. In January of 2020, LADY CLEMENTINE, the story of the incredible Clementine Churchill, was released, and became an international bestseller. Her next novel, the Instant NYTimes and USAToday bestselling THE MYSTERY OF MRS. CHRISTIE, was published on December 29, 2020, and her first co-written book, THE PERSONAL LIBRARIAN, with the talented Victoria Christopher Murray, will be released on June 29, 2021. Writing as Heather Terrell, Marie also published the historical novels The Chrysalis, The Map Thief, and Brigid of Kildare.

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Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate and Master of the Short Story, Dies at 92

Her stories were widely considered to be without equal, a mixture of ordinary people and extraordinary themes.

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By Anthony DePalma

Alice Munro, the revered Canadian author who started writing short stories because she did not think she had the time or the talent to master novels, then stubbornly dedicated her long career to churning out psychologically dense stories that dazzled the literary world and earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Monday night in Port Hope, Ontario, east of Toronto. She was 92.

A spokesman for her publisher, Penguin Random House Canada, confirmed the death, at a nursing home. Ms. Munro’s health had declined since at least 2009, when she said she’d had heart bypass surgery and had been treated for cancer, though she continued to write.

Ms. Munro was a member of the rare breed of writer, like Katherine Anne Porter and Raymond Carver, who made their reputations in the notoriously difficult literary arena of the short story, and did so with great success. Her tales — many of them focused on women at different stages of their lives coping with complex desires — were so eagerly received and gratefully read that she attracted a whole new generation of readers.

Ms. Munro’s stories were widely considered to be without equal, a mixture of ordinary people and extraordinary themes. She portrayed small-town folks, often in rural southwestern Ontario, facing situations that made the fantastic seem an everyday occurrence. Some of her characters were fleshed out so completely through generations and across continents that readers reached a level of intimacy with them that usually comes only with a full-length novel.

She achieved such compactness through exquisite craftsmanship and a degree of precision that did not waste words. Other writers declared some of her stories to be near-perfect — a heavy burden for a writer of modest personal character who had struggled to overcome a lack of self-confidence at the beginning of her career, when she left the protective embrace of her quiet hometown and ventured into the competitive literary scene.

Her insecurity, however powerfully she felt it, was never noticed by her fellow writers, who celebrated her craftsmanship and freely lent her their highest praise.

The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien ranked Ms. Munro with William Faulkner and James Joyce as writers who had influenced her work. Joyce Carol Oates said Munro stories “have the density — moral, emotional, sometimes historical — of other writers’ novels.” And the novelist Richard Ford once made it clear that questioning Ms. Munro’s mastery over the short story would be akin to doubting the hardness of a diamond or the bouquet of a ripened peach.

“With Alice it’s like a shorthand,” Mr. Ford said. “You’ll just mention her, and everybody just kind of generally nods that she’s just sort of as good as it gets.”

In awarding her the Nobel in 2013 , when she was 82, the Swedish Academy cited her 14 collections of stories and referred to her as “a master of the contemporary short story,” praising her ability to “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages.”

As famous for the refined exuberance of her prose as for the modesty of her personal life, Ms. Munro declined to travel to Sweden to accept her Nobel, saying she was too frail. In place of the formal lecture that winners traditionally give, she taped a long interview in Victoria, British Columbia, where she had been visiting when her award was announced. When asked if the process of writing her stories had consumed her entirely, she responded that it did, then added, “But you know, I always got lunch for my children.”

During the presentation of the taped interview at the Swedish Academy, the Swedish actress Pernilla August read an excerpt from Ms. Munro’s story “Carried Away,” a multi-decade tale of dashed expectations that typified the complicated, often disappointing, world of her stories.

“She had a picture taken. She knew how she wanted it to be,” the excerpt read. “She would have liked to wear a simple white blouse, a peasant girl’s smock with the string open at the neck. She did not own a blouse of that description and in fact had only seen them in pictures. And she would have liked to let her hair down. Or if it had to be up, she would have liked it piled very loosely and bound with strings of pearls.

“Instead she wore her blue silk shirtwaist and bound her hair as usual. She thought the picture made her look rather pale, hollow-eyed. Her expression was sterner and more foreboding than she had intended. She sent it anyway.”

‘Our Chekhov’

Ms. Munro’s early success in Canada, where her first collection of stories, “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1968), won the Governor General’s Literary Award, the equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, spread to the United States after her stories began to be published in The New Yorker in 1977. She was an important member of a generation of Canadian writers, along with Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, whose celebrity reached far beyond the country’s borders.

Ms. Munro went on to win the Governor General’s award twice more, along with two Giller Prizes, another important national award in Canada, and many other honors. In 2009, she withdrew her collection “Too Much Happiness” from consideration for yet another Giller because she believed that a younger writer should have a chance to win it.

That same year she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for her lifelong body of work, which the judges claimed was “practically perfect.” The awards committee commented that although she was known mostly as a short-story writer, “she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.”

“To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before,” the judges said.

As her many-layered style developed, her short stories came to be neither short nor simply stories — she included 15 stories in her first book, but only eight or nine longer ones in some of her most recent collections. The greater length of each story gave her room to explore the psychological profiles of her characters more fully, and the resulting works are tightly woven tapestries of great tension, lasting resonance and stunning breadth that combine the emotional thrust of a novel with the pinpoint power of a masterful poem.

Over the years, her stories seemed to grow darker and more paradoxical, even though she often described her own life as ordinary and generally upbeat. Often her characters were simple people confronting unusual circumstances. But those situations could be odd, even bizarre, such as an accident in which a soldier who returned from war is decapitated after his sleeve is caught in a factory machine, or the actions of an unattractive girl who steals so much money from her parents’ store to pay boys for sex that her parents are forced to declare bankruptcy. The women in her stories tended to be emotionally pierced — divorced women, adulteresses and noble victims of life’s vicissitudes.

Like Faulkner, Eudora Welty and the other Southern writers she admired, Ms. Munro was capable of breathing life into an entire world — for her, the importunate countryside of southwestern Ontario and the placid, occasionally threatening presence of Lake Huron.

Cynthia Ozick called her “our Chekhov,” and the description stuck.

In a 2009 review of “Too Much Happiness,” Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described the collection’s title story as “a brilliant distillation of her Chekhovian art.”

Never a Novel

Ms. Munro was able to live a life remarkable for its normalcy. Her days, like her characters’, were filled with quotidian routines punctuated by the explosive mystery of happenstance and accident.

Outside of a decade spent on the west coast of Canada during her first marriage, she lived with a great deal of satisfaction in the Ontario bramble she celebrated in her stories, quietly composing them in the house where her second husband was raised, not far from the place where she was born.

Perhaps the question that most dogged her throughout her long career was why, with her abundant talents and perceptive eye, she restricted herself to what is generally seen as the limited world of the short story rather than launch into the glittery universe of the novel.

“I don’t really understand a novel,” Ms. Munro confessed to Mervyn Rothstein of The Times in a 1986 interview. “I don’t understand where the excitement is supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a story. There’s a kind of tension that if I’m getting a story right I can feel right away.”

While one of her early collections, “Lives of Girls and Women,” is sometimes called a novel, Ms. Munro and her longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Ann Close, considered it a collection of linked stories.

“Once I started to write that, I was off,” she told The Paris Review. “Then I made a big mistake. I tried to make it a regular novel, an ordinary sort of childhood adolescence novel. About March I saw it wasn’t working. It didn’t feel right to me, and I thought I would have to abandon it. I was very depressed. Then it came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in the story form. Then I could handle it.”

At times she swore she would never write a novel — almost dismissing the challenge as too great for her to even attempt. But at other times she seemed to wistfully wonder, as one of her characters might, how different her life might have been had she written a blockbuster novel.

“I’m thinking of something now, how it might be a novel, but I bet you it won’t be,” she said in a 1998 interview, just after publication of her widely acclaimed collection “The Love of a Good Woman.” She confessed that on occasion she had experimented with stretching her stories into novels but said she found that the stories “start to sag” when she did so, as though being taken beyond their natural limits. Still, the lure never completely evaporated. “My ambition is to write a novel before I die,” she said, also in 1998.

She never did.

Shortly before receiving her Nobel in 2013, Ms. Munro told several interviewers that she had decided to stop writing. As far back as 2009, she had disclosed her cancer diagnosis and that she’d undergone heart bypass surgery. Her declining health had robbed her of strength, but she also remarked that she’d been writing since she was 20 and had grown weary of what Del, a character in “Lives of Girls and Women” who is generally taken to be Ms. Munro’s proxy, says is a writer’s only duty, which is “to produce a masterpiece.”

“That’s a long time to be working,” Ms. Munro said, “and I thought maybe it’s time to take it easy.”

Rural Beginnings

Alice Ann Laidlaw was born on July 10, 1931, in the village of Wingham, Ontario, hard by the banks of Lake Huron. She was the first of three children of Robert Eric Laidlaw and Anne Clarke (Chamney) Laidlaw. Her father had tried his luck at the rather exotic undertaking of raising silver foxes and mink, but when that failed he went through a number of professions, including stints as foundry watchman and turkey farmer.

When Anne Laidlaw developed Parkinson’s disease, it fell to Alice, not yet a teenager but the oldest of the three children, to care for her mother, an experience that she wove through her writing. She was able to attend college after winning a two-year scholarship to the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, about 65 miles south of Wingham.

She majored in English but initially kept her ambition to write fiction to herself. She dropped out before completing her studies and married a fellow student, James Munro. She sold her first short work of fiction, a story, to the radio service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Munros settled in Vancouver and had two children; a third died at birth. Ms. Munro said the domestic demands of those years — balancing parenthood with her dream of writing, “getting apple juice, answering the phone and letting the cat in” — left her no time or energy for ambitious projects like writing novels. Instead, she dedicated herself to mastering the short story, a form that she felt she could manage in between raising her children and taking care of her house.

In 1963, Ms. Munro and her husband moved to Victoria, where she helped him found a bookstore, Munro’s, and gave birth to another daughter. The marriage ended in 1973, and she moved back to Ontario.

By then, her literary reputation in Canada was established. In 1968, her first book, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” a collection of short stories compiled over a dozen years, introduced readers to what would later be widely recognized as “Alice Munro Country” — the rigidly introspective landscape of solitary country roads and stolid houses of yellow brick within which shy lives and solemn secrets unfolded.

“Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way,” she wrote in a 1982 essay. “That is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story is for me.”

Her stories are blanketed with countless small but sharp observations that animate Munro Country. For instance, in “Spaceships Have Landed,” a story in the collection “Open Secrets” (1994), the main character drunkenly flirts with her boyfriend’s friend, only to be grossly insulted by him. The next day, she calls him to the porch of her house and confronts him while using a piece of steel wool to clean freshly laid eggs.

Such details evoke a sense of the semirural Canadian backcountry, a quiet land where people never deliberately call attention to themselves and the ordinariness of life can be suddenly disrupted by accidents, arrivals and unanticipated departures.

Although Ms. Munro was most often described as a Canadian writer, her stories evoked not Canada itself but the bittersweet triumphs, mishaps and humiliations of small town life. And in the end, every landscape served as backdrop for her central themes, which were the unpredictability of life and the betrayals that women suffer or commit — scenes redolent with autobiography.

In “The Albanian Virgin,” a celebrated story featuring a rare exotic setting as well as the familiar Canadian landscape, the female protagonist runs a bookstore in Victoria and dreamily contemplates the errant directions taken by her life: “But I was not despondent. I had made a desperate change in my life, and in spite of the regrets that I suffered every day, I was proud of that. I felt as if I had finally come out into the world in a new, true, skin.”

A Publicity-Shy ‘Plodder’

Ms. Munro shunned much of the publicity usually associated with literary success and limited her book tour appearances and readings. She often referred to herself in a self-deprecating way; she said she had not “come out of the closet” as a professional writer until she was 40, and she called herself a “plodder” because of the slow and deliberate way she worked, often writing in her nightclothes for several hours in the morning and then extensively revising her stories before sending them off.

But to critics, there was nothing plodding about her stories, which were put together so seamlessly that the many flashbacks, flash-forwards and shifts in time and place that she employed happened without notice. She often started her stories at a point where other authors might end theirs, and continued them well past the climax or denouement that would have satisfied others less driven by the twists of fate. Inevitably, this left readers to work out who exactly the narrator was and how one character was related to another.

Eventually, though, every piece would fit together. “It’s like a child’s puzzle,” the novelist Anne Tyler once said of Ms. Munro’s work. “In the most successful of the stories, the end result is a satisfying click as everything settles precisely into place.”

After the turbulence and dislocation she went through before Ms. Munro turned 40, her life and career clicked satisfyingly into place when she returned to southern Ontario. She started seeing Gerald Fremlin, a geographer, and after a brief romance married him and moved into the house in Clinton, Ontario, where he was raised.

She is survived by her daughters, Sheila, Jenny and Andrea. Sheila Munro is the author of the 2001 memoir “Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro.”

She embarked on an ambitious schedule of publishing a collection of short stories every three or four years, winning praise and admiration across Canada, where she comes close to being a household literary saint. After receiving her first Governor General’s award, she won it twice more, for “Who Do You Think You Are?” in 1978 and for “The Progress of Love” in 1986.

In 1998, she received the Giller Prize for “The Love of a Good Woman,” and in 2004 she picked up another for “Runaway.” After the National Book Critics Circle agreed for the first time to consider authors from outside the United States for its award, Ms. Munro won in 1998 for “The Love of a Good Woman.”

As if she were a character in one of her stories, plagued by bad timing and unlucky happenstance, Ms. Munro was not at home when the Swedish Academy called to tell her that she had won; it had to leave a telephone message. She was in Victoria visiting her daughter, who heard the news and woke her mother at 4 a.m. Still groggy when interviewed by the CBC, Ms. Munro admitted that she’d forgotten that the prize was to be awarded that day, calling it “a splendid thing to happen,” adding, “more than I can say.”

Struggling to control her emotions, she reflected on her success and what it might mean for literature. “My stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories,” she told the interviewer. “I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not something you play around with until you got a novel written.”

Lisa D. Awano and Sofia Poznansky contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the given name of an author who praised Ms. Munro’s writing. She is Anne Tyler, not Ann.

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Observe Memorial Day with these events in southern Maine

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Kids and adults gather at a Memorial Day parade to honor and celebrate veterans in South Portland. Sofia Aldinio/ Staff Photographer

BATH 10 a.m. Monday. Parade begins at 200 Congress Ave. and concludes at Library Park and will be followed by a wreath-laying service at 11 a.m.

BERWICK 11 a.m. Monday. Parade begins at Berwick Town Hall/Sullivan Square and proceeds to Lord’s Cemetery by way of Wilson and Allen streets. After a ceremony there, the parade will continue down Saw Mill Hill Street with a pause at the Somersworth-Berwick Bridge for a brief memorial service for those lost at sea. The parade ends at Sullivan Square with a memorial service honoring area veterans.

BIDDEFORD-SACO Opening ceremony at 9:55 a.m. Monday at Saco City Hall. Parade starts at 10 a.m. from Saco City Hall and proceeds along Main Street and down York Hill into Biddeford, continues along Main Street, onto Alfred Street and finishes at Veteran’s Memorial Park with a closing ceremony at 10:45 a.m.

BRUNSWICK-TOPSHAM 9 a.m. Monday. Parade proceeds from Topsham Town Hall, pauses for observances while crossing the Brunswick-Topsham bridge, and concludes at the Brunswick Mall.

CAPE ELIZABETH 9 a.m. Monday. Parade begins at the middle school parking lot, turns right on Scott Dyer Road, right onto Route 77 and ends at the village green adjacent to the town hall. A brief ceremony and laying of the wreath will be held at the Village Green after the parade.

CUMBERLAND 8 a.m. Monday. Kids run at Greely High School followed by 5K Run and Remember race at 8:30 a.m. Parade starts at 10 a.m. at Mabel I. Wilson School and ends at the veterans’ monument in Moss Side Cemetery in Cumberland Center, where a ceremony will be held at 10:30 a.m. Advertisement

FALMOUTH 10 a.m. Monday. Parade proceeds from 65 Depot Road (Falmouth American Legion) to Pine Grove Park, where a ceremony will be held.

FREEPORT 9:30 a.m. Monday. Parade proceeds from Holbrook Street, heads north on Main and makes a right onto School Street, then right onto Park Street, ending in Memorial Park. There will be a small ceremony in Memorial Park starting at 10 a.m.

GORHAM 11 a.m. Monday. Parade starts at Village School (12 Robie St.) and ends at Eastern Cemetery on Johnson Road.

GRAY 11:30 a.m. Monday. Parade leaves the Russell School (8 Gray Park), proceeds to Shaker Road and continues to the Soldiers Monument at the intersection of Routes 26 and 3 for a wreath-laying ceremony. Parade continues north to the American Legion Post (15 Lewiston Road) for a closing ceremony.

LYMAN 1 p.m. Monday. Parade starts at Waterhouse Road/Mill Pond in Goodwins Mills and ends at the Lyman Town Hall on South Waterboro Road.

NEW GLOUCESTER 9 a.m. Monday. Parade leaves from Memorial Elementary School (86 Intervale Road) and heads down Intervale Road to Route 100/202 to Veterans Park for a memorial service. The parade will reconvene and go down Peacock Hill Road, then take a left on Gilmore Road. Advertisement

OLD ORCHARD BEACH 1 p.m. Monday. Parade starts at the corner of Ballpark Way and E. Emerson Cumming Boulevard and proceeds down Saco Avenue, Old Orchard Beach Street to First Street and ends at Veteran’s Memorial Park.

PORTLAND 2 p.m. Monday. The procession starts at Longfellow School (432 Stevens Ave.) and ends at Evergreen Cemetery for a commemoration ceremony.

SANFORD 10 a.m. Monday. The parade starts at the Sanford Armory (88 William Oscar Emery Drive), proceeds up Gowen Park Drive and ends at Central Park.

SCARBOROUGH 10 a.m. Monday. Parade starts at Scarborough High School, turns onto Route 114 and then Route 1, past town offices to the Maine Veterans Home and concludes with a ceremony there.

SOUTH PORTLAND 10:30 a.m. Monday. Parade starts at Southern Maine Community College parking lot, proceeds down Broadway to the Veterans Monument for a short Memorial Day recognition service.

WELLS 9 a.m. Monday. Parade starts at Wells High School (200 Sanford Road) and proceeds to Ocean View Cemetery for a ceremony and musical performances. Advertisement

WESTBROOK 10 a.m. Monday. Parade proceeds down Main Street and will be followed by a ceremony in Riverbank Park.

WINDHAM 9 a.m. Monday. Parade starts at Windham Town Hall and proceeds onto Route 202 toward Windham High School. At 10 a.m., there will be a ceremony in front of Windham’s Veterans Memorial Flagpole at Windham High School.

YARMOUTH 10 a.m. Monday. Parade leaves from Yarmouth High School (286 West Elm St.) and proceeds to the Memorial Green at Town Hall for a ceremony.

YORK 10 a.m. Monday. Parade starts near St. Christopher’s Church (4 Barrell Lane) and proceeds down York Street to York Town Hall.

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