An interesting biography about a fascinating figure: Belle da Costa Greene, who not only managed to become one of the very few women of prominence in the rare book/archival world of the early twentieth century, but did so while a mixed-race woman passing as white. Greene's father was the first Black man to graduate from Harvard, but she, her mother, and her siblings cut all apparent ties with the African American community in order to gain more social and economic opportunities.

Heidi Ardizzone is strong at showing how class, race, and gender intersected in the U.S. (and to a certain extent the western Europe) of the period, and at using the surviving letters which Greene wrote to her on-off lover, the art critic Bernard Berenson, to reconstruct something of her relationship. Ardizzone is less interested in—or perhaps limited by the surviving source material, it's difficult to tell—Greene's work as a medievalist and librarian, topics that I would have loved to know more about. As a medieval historian myself, I had heard of Greene and her legacy before I ever picked up this book, but I'm not sure based on what I read here that I quite have a handle on the arc of her career or why she became so influential—we get lots of quotations from Greene's love letters but nothing from, e.g. one of the manuscript catalogues she compiled which might have shown us something of her mastery of the field. On a prose level, this is also quite lumpy, with a lot of needless repetition that could have been cut to make for a stronger book. (Also, an eyebrow-raising number of typos in a professionally printed book—and I'm not just talking about the references to "Bell" Greene "per say.")

These quibbles aside, this is still an interesting look at the life of a woman who demanded notice even as she strove to remain elusive, and who seized the opportunities she could from a specific moment in U.S. history. ( )

The fascinating chronicle of the life of one of history's great biblio-humans. My only gripe is that I wish the author had managed to fit in more about her subject's actual work with the books and manuscripts of the Morgan Library. ( )

Too much of a minute-by-minute recounting of her life, with too little reflection on the meaning and values the people involved. Belle da Costa Greene had numerous sexual affairs with powerful men but the author doesn't consider that these relationships might have been strategic. She was vivacious and extremely competent, but she also treated people badly. Her lover was, as far as I can tell, a whiny unethical narcissist, yet the writer makes no judgments. Finally, 90% of the biography is based on her correspondence this lover, and she was not very critical of how that shaped the narrative. This biography was ultimately unsatisfying. ( )

I was quite disappointed that this biography did not go into the librarianship and curatorial considerations that were involved in managing J.P. Morgan’s glorious collections, plus some of the specialized knowledge de Costa Greene obtained as she proceeded and/or what has been learned since that time.

I guess I was “misled” by the clever title, “An Illuminated Life”, which plays on the illuminated manuscripts she worked with but refers more so to the mysteries of her life that are "illuminated" by this book.

Granted, both Belle de Costa Greene and the clarified "mysteries" are quite striking and admirable. ( )

It is a rare visit to New York that I do not go to the Morgan Library and Museum. With its extraordinary holdings of illuminated manuscripts, fine bindings, old master prints and drawings, it is a splendid place to while away the hours. Although it was J.P. Morgan's interest and money that began the collection, Belle da Costa Greene, his personal librarian and, later, director of the Morgan Library, was, in large part, responsible for shaping and directing it. He hired her, fresh from Princeton, in 1905, and she remained at the Library until shortly before her death in 1950.

Ardizzone's book concentrates on two main themes: Greene's family background and her love affair with Bernard Berenson.

Greene was born Belle Marion Greener, into a family of color that had been part of the District of Columbia's black élite. Indeed, her father was the first African-American to graduate from Harvard. But when he and her mother, Genevieve, separated, perhaps due to class differences, perhaps because of his political activities in the race arena, Mrs. Greener, by then living in New York, changed her name and she and her children lived as white. Ardizzone is careful to use the term "lived as white" as opposed to "passing" to allow for the very real possibility that they considered themselves white, having a predominantly white ancestry. (Her discussion of the changing "rules" and cultural assumptions regarding racial identity is, indeed, one of the more interesting parts of this book.* ) Belle created the fiction of a Portuguese ancestry to account for her darker complexion, and was often described as "exotic"-looking.

The majority of the book is devoted to Greene's relationship with art historian/art dealer Bernard Berenson, a womanizer of great renown. (Berenson's wife, Mary, vacillated between being a facilitator of his relationships, and getting depressed and angry over them. What a household!) Belle differed from Berenson's other women, though, in that she was a career woman. She couldn't (and wouldn't) drop everything to be with him, and over the years they were apart more than they were together. Although each had needs and desires that the other could not fulfill, their influence on each other was enormous. (Sadly, while her letters to Berenson were saved, his to her were lost when she chose to destroy her personal papers before her death. It is to Ardizzone's credit as an historian that she has been able to write such a credible account of this relationship sans those documents.)

Greene, dubbed by the press the "glamorous librarian", was a mass of contradictions (but then, aren't we all?). She was close to her family, living with them and often being the sole, or major, financial support. Yet she seems to have kept them quite separate from her professional life. She lived as white, but frequently made veiled references to her black ancestry (and surely, if she were open about this, it would have negatively affected her in her profession). She had a tumultuous affair with Berenson, as well as relationships with other men, but the times required that she be as discreet as possible. Despite having made her way in the professional world, she was ambivalent about suffrage and the women's rights movement.

Although Ms. Ardizzone is often repetitious in making her points, her subject matter is so interesting that it really doesn't matter. What does matter is that I missed any real sense of how and why Greene became such a powerful figure in her world of book and manuscript collectors. I wanted more about her work, more about her influence on the development of Morgan's collection, more about how she gained her own expert knowledge. Nevertheless, Ardizzone has written a compelling personal biography about a fascinating woman.

*As it happens, while I was reading this book I saw an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art which included a piece by Adrian Piper, Cornered, on this very theme. Addressing the viewer in video, Piper challenges us to consider our assumptions about how we identify ourselves and others racially. On the wall are two birth certificates for Piper's father, issued a couple of decades apart: one identifies him as "mulatto", the other says that he is "white". Appearance often trumped the "one drop" rule (the laws that said "one drop" of Negro blood made a person black). Indeed, the historic Plessy v. Ferguson decision of the United States Supreme Court, allowing legally mandated segregation, arose from a challenge to such laws in which African-Americans sought to show the illogic of such segregation by the very fact that Mr. Plessy had to tell the train conductor that he was not white. Years later, Mr. Plessy self-identified as white in order to vote.