Book Review: Belle Greene

Belle Greene by Alexandra Lapierre, translated by Tina Kover (Europa Editions, 2022).

New York’s Morgan Library and Museum has long been one of my favorite museums (a security guard there practically had to peel me off the glass covering the original manuscript of A Christmas Carol), even before I learned about the amazing woman who helped to build it. So when I found out there was a new novel about her, I couldn’t wait to read it and learn more of her story.

It’s quite a story. Belle da Costa Greene, born Belle Marion Greener, was the daughter of prominent Black activist Richard Greener. Unfortunately, Belle’s father, who fought hard for racial justice, had no time or concern left for his family. Needing to support themselves, and feeling little loyalty to the man who had abandoned them, Belle and her siblings made the dangerous decision to pass as white. Stepping over the color line would bring them a world of opportunity, but it would also put their very lives at risk.

Belle Greene by Alexandra Lapierre shows just how much that decision brought them, and how much it cost. The brilliant and ambitious Belle gets a job in the Princeton University library, but soon gains a place working for banking tycoon and avid book collector J. P. Morgan. Purchasing some of the world’s rarest and costliest books on his behalf, cataloguing them, studying them, caring for them—the work suits Belle perfectly, and she adores it. She even learns to enjoy working with her temperamental and controlling employer, finding common ground in their love and respect for books and their desire to build his library into one of the greatest in the world.

Lapierre is the kind of writer who can make a rare book auction into a thrilling action scene, and make a reader yearn to hold a copy of the bejeweled 8th-century Lindau Gospels. She gets you so caught up in Belle’s untiring passion for her work, it tears at your heart to think that Belle would have been barred from that work if her heritage had been known. It was hard enough for a woman to excel in her field—for a Black woman, at that time, it would have been unthinkable. The manuscripts she loved would have been forever beyond her reach, and many if not all of the colleagues who liked and respected her would have turned against her. Belle carried that knowledge with her every day of her life. Even those to whom she was closest could never know the whole truth about her.

Walking this tightrope in public—for moving in such wealthy and sophisticated circles inevitably meant public attention—might have exhausted most people. But in Lapierre’s telling, it only adds to Belle’s drive. Taking risks seems to be essential to her very nature. Just imagine the chutzpah it would take to hide in plain sight with your new surname being only one letter off from your well-known father’s surname. Lapierre quotes extensively from the real Belle Greene’s letters, which display that daring: “I feel like a fugitive Negro hiding in the woods,” she writes to a lover, the art historian Bernard Berenson, at a low point in her life.

“It was a strange and devastating confession,” Lapierre adds, “and she knew B.B. would not really understand it.”

Perhaps this recklessness explains why Belle’s love life is as messy as her work life is perfectionistic. But Belle convinces herself she’s successfully balanced it all, until her secret becomes a threat to the person she loves most.

More than just a fictionalized biography, Belle Greene reads like a sprawling epic of America and Europe in the early 20th century, rife with promise but fraught with peril. Deftly translated from the original French by Tina Kover, Lapierre’s book opens up a vanished world in all its glory. Occasionally over the course of its nearly 500 pages, things start to drag a little, but they soon pick back up and get just as exciting and absorbing as before.

I hope every one of you reading this gets the chance someday to visit the magnificent library that Belle Greene created. But in the meantime, I hope you’ll read this book and get to know Belle herself.

(Cover image copyright Europa Editions)

Book Links:

Belle Greene on Amazon
Belle Greene on Bookshop

Other Links:

Over at Dickensblog, I reviewed Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby.