The Best-Paid Woman in NYC

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 579 Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, entrusted with building his collection, Belle da Costa Greene could ‘spend more money in an afternoon than any other young woman of 26’, as the New York Times put it in 1912. In the latest LRB, Francesca Wade reviews a new biography of Greene and a recent exhibition dedicated to her at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, of which Greene was the first director. Francesca joins Tom on the podcast to talk about Greene's life and work. They discuss her long-term, long-distance relationship with the art historian Bernard Berenson and her reasons for concealing her African American heritage. Find further reading in the LRB: https://lrb.me/wadepod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,
0:07.4	Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,
0:12.4	from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works
0:17.2	by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes
0:22.5	for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice
0:28.3	and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with
0:35.5	two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now.
0:39.2	And in the third episode, I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky.
0:43.1	You can find a link in the description, or search close readings, wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and this week I'm talking to Francesca Wade, the author of Square Haunting,
1:12.4	Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, and of Gertrude Stein and Afterlife, which was
1:18.4	published just last month, I think. Yeah, that's right. She has a piece in the latest issue of the
1:23.1	LRB on Bell de Costa Green, who was the financier J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, and later the first
1:29.5	director of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. The piece is a review of two books or a
1:35.7	catalogue in the book. Belde Costa Green, a librarian's legacy edited by Erica Chalella and Philip
1:41.4	S. Palmer, which is the catalogue of a recent exhibition at the Morgan Library,
1:45.8	and becoming Belde Costa Green, a visionary librarian through her letters by Deborah Parker.
1:51.3	So, hello, Francesca, and thank you for joining me today.
1:53.6	Hi. Thanks for having me.
1:55.7	So Belde Costa Green did some amazing things as Morgan's librarian. She acquired some amazing books. We'll maybe talk
2:02.4	about some of those in a minute. And after Morgan's death, she turned his private library into a
2:07.1	public institution. But the story of how she came to get the job is also, as you say in the piece,
2:12.1	quite remarkable. So who was she? Who was Belle de Costa Green? She wasn't born with that name, was she?
	...

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