Personal Librarian, Benedict and Murray - B+

            This fabulous novel is an imagining of the career of Belle da Costa Greene, a woman of African-American descent who passed as white. She was so brilliant, savvy and witty that she worked for J.P.Morgan and helped to assemble his world-famous library. She was from a family of college-educated Blacks and had worked as a librarian at Princeton for six years before she was hired by Morgan. She quickly becomes his right hand and partner in art acquisitions. Soon, she's at the Opera, the Symphony and parties at the Vanderbilt's. Throughout her time mingling with the rich and negotiating in the all-male world of art dealers, she is on guard. The line is that her grandmother was Portuguese, but one misstep can out her.

          A month long fling with a noted expert on Italian art while in Europe, and the termination of a pregnancy, throw her structured life into turmoil. After a stern remonstrance from her mother, she pulls it together and is on the job in the spring of 1913 when she learns that Morgan has died in Rome. She is alone. She slowly recovers and JP's son, Jack, advises her that she will stay on permanently and that his father bequeathed her $50,000. She continues to dazzle the art world, and reconciles with her father, who had started her on the path toward art studies when she was younger. She hopes to convince Jack to make the library a public one. He does and in 1924 it becomes a public reference library and art gallery, with Belle as its director.

      Belle retired in 1948 and died two years later. It appears she never publicly acknowledged passing in the white world. This a great book, one of the NYT's top ten of 2021. Thanks so much to Wendell for the recommendation.