The Personal Librarian

 by Marie Bendict and Victoria Christopher Murray

This book is the fictional story of a real person Belle de Costa Greene who gets the job as the personal librarian for J.P.Morgan who is trying to build a library of early books to rival the Medici library that was developed in Florence.

Belle has a secret, she is really of negro ancestry but her mother has chosen to make a life for them where they are pretending to be white.  Belle's parents separate when the family moves from Washington to New York.  The father is the first black graduate of Harvard and is actively working for black civil rights.  He cannot agree with what his wife is doing.

Belle had been a librarian at Princeton.  She is recommended to Morgan by a young relative.  As time goes on Belle studies Greek and Latin and ancient art and literature and becomes not just a librarian to Morgan but also a confident and even a buyer for him, travelling the world to attend auctions and bid on items for the library.

All the while she is terrified her background will be revealed.  She keeps telling people her skin colour comes from a Porugese grandmother.

She becomes the toast of New York for her succes and eventually has an affair with a married man, an art historian and art dealer.  When she becomes pregnant he arranges for her to get an abortion in London but he is not there for her.  She is distraught at his treatment and eventually they carriy on a correspondence over the decades.  His wife is okay with their affair.  However, she finds that rumours are swirling around her and she has to lie to Morgan that she is not having an affair.  He seems to want  her for himself (not as a lover).   She feels he is treating her as his property, a slave, but she stays working for him.  When Morgan dies she receives a big bequest which helps her family's stability.  She has been supporting her mother, siblings and ultimately their spouses for years.

I found the book, especially the first half , really slow and uninteresting.  It was about her early years as the librarian which is okay but then had lots about balls and operas, etc.  I think most of that could have been shortented.  At times she was so stressed she started to drink too much and could have done something to damage her reputation but she managed to keep her secret over the years.  I don't know how or when the truth actually came out.