Rare Book School Lecture: Women's LIbraries & Their Afterlives

Women’s book collections appear in a wide range of forms: as catalogued libraries; as groups of surviving books linked by inscription and family use; or as volumes dispersed but still traceable through the historical record. In some cases, a woman’s library may never have existed as a traditional collection. Women’s commonplace books record reading lives—and can produce something like a library in manuscript form. Considered together, these collections are not always bounded or stable. Some are large and well-documented; others survive only in small clusters or scattered traces. Drawing on examples ranging from the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century, Elizabeth Canning (book collector and board member of the Book Club of Washington) examines how these different modes of creation and survival complicate familiar ideas about what a library can be. Looking for such associations—and for the ways book collections are formed, dispersed, and remade—offers insight into how women and girls lived with books, and into the limits and possibilities of collecting these materials.

This lecture is also available by Zoom livestream.