The title of Sheila Liming's important and far-reaching monograph, What a Library Means to a Woman, evokes Edith Wharton's autobiographical account of her father's library at their home on West Twenty-third Street in New York, which the author claimed “had the leading share in [her] growth” (Wharton, Backward 64). What does a library mean to a woman called Edith Wharton? In Liming's words, it “crucially informed her understandings of herself and played a vital role in shaping the narrative of self-development that emerged in concert with her identity as an author” (2).
The title is also purposefully misleading. What a Library Means to a Woman is “not just a study of one woman and her library collection. It is a book about networked systems of social and cultural disparity” based on “a specific woman's initiation into a world of varied and unequal rules” (10). Wharton's depiction of...
