In the past couple of months I read two books written by female authors about women who defied the social norms of their time. Even if they didn’t manage to break the glass ceiling, they bypassed it.
The first book, The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray is based on the life of Belle da Costa Greene, a historical figure who lived and worked in early to mid-twentieth century in New York. Belle was the daughter of Richard Theodore Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard University, an activist and lawyer.
At the urging of her mother, Belle takes advantage of her light complexion, changes her name from Belle Marion Greener to Belle da Costa Green and pretends to be of Portuguese ancestry.
Belle, who fell in love with fine arts and old manuscripts under the influence of her dad, grows up to become an expert in the field. When J.P. Morgan is looking to hire a librarian for his personal library, Belle, a young and petite woman, manages to snag the position from many older, more experienced male competitors.
Under the tutelage of her mother, who encourages all her light-skinned children to pass as white, and trains Belle systematically in how to handle delicate situations when her experience, credentials or ancestry are questioned, Belle manages to maneuver the course of her career. She gradually acquires new skills and insights of her own on how to deal with the demanding and capricious J.P. Morgan, and his acrimonious daughter. Belle becomes an expert both in spotting, finding, and authenticating ancient manuscripts, and in bidding on them in auctions, and negotiating sales contracts. So much so that her boss trusts her with huge sums of his money to acquire manuscripts and art for his personal Pierpont Morgan library. Belle does this while being the only woman in a sea of men, and being extra cautious not to accidentally give away her secret of being black.
The storyline is linear and the writing devoid of any humor. The book mainly concerns itself with Belle’s fear of her true identity being revealed, and thus is a tense read. Through her meteoric success as J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, she gets many promotions and is able to provide many necessities and luxuries for her family. However, she knows how very racist Morgan is and if he finds out she’s black he will fire her with no second thought. Not only will she lose her job, but also she will not be able to find another one, because no one will knowingly hire a black woman for any decent job. Thus her family will lose their high lifestyle.
This fear forces her to sign off on the prospect of marriage, because her children might betray her ancestry. It also forces her to develop various coping mechanisms when Morgan pressures her to attend his family parties, concerts and balls. She also cultivates her patience to deal with Morgan when he is extra stressed and extra capricious, and coddling skills when he needs to be comforted. She is such a resourceful and capable woman that even living under these circumstances she manages to have a forbidden affair with someone who has his own secrets to guard.
What I found more interesting than the fictitious book based on a remarkable historical character was the relationship between its two co-authors, discussed at the end of the book. When Marie Benedict, a white lawyer turned novelist, had the idea to write A Personal Librarian, she felt she would benefit from a black woman’s perspective, in character development, racist social attitudes and language of the time. So she approached Victoria Christopher Murray, a black writer, regarding co-writing the book. And “the rest is history” as they say. The two women formed a lasting deep bond, learned from each other, and discovered a lot about their subject.
The Personal Librarian is a historical fiction about an amazing woman who defies the norms of her day and age to become one of the most powerful women of her time.
The second book I read, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, is also about a woman defying the stereotypes of her time. But whereas Belle is a historical character, Elizabeth is ficticious. While The Personal Librarian is a tense read, Lessons in Chemistry is light and funny. And while Belle lies all the time in order to succeed, Elizabeth is a compulsive truth-teller sometimes to her own detriment.
The story is about Elizabeth Zott, a PhD Cnadidate in chemistry at the UCLA in 1950s, who is practically kicked out of the program because she stabs her advisor with a pencil while he was sexually assaulting her. The police doesn’t believe her story. Afterall the advisor is male and a professor, wherease she “just” a girl.
Later, while working at the Hastings Institute she meets and falls in love with Calvin Evans, a genius and a famous Nobel Prize nominated chemist. A genius daughter is born of their union.
Hastings kicks Elizabeth out because she becomes pregnant out of wedlock. As a last resort she agrees to be the chef on a cooking show. Despite the recommendations and demands of her bosses to wear sexy clothes and fix cocktails at the end of the show, Elizabeth wears trousers or drab dresses. “She looked like a cross between a hotel maid and a bomb-squad expert,” doesn’t fix cocktails and mixes a lot of explanations on the chemistry of ingredients and why and how they interact with each other. This makes her show a hit. She makes women feel intelligent and empowered to learn and do things other than housekeeping. Elizabeth continues to defy the sexist norms of the society, like she’s impervious to them.
There are many secondary characters in Lessons in Chemistry who help or hinder Elizabeth’s trajectory in life. The genius of Garmus is the extreme qualities she convincingly and humorously injects into them. She’s got super-dumb people and super-smart animals. Of the lecherous and abusive husband of Elizabeth’s friend, Harriet, she writes, “Like most stupid people he wasn’t smart enough to know just how stupid he was.”
My favorite by a long shot was Six-Thirty, Elizabeth’s dog, who picks up her has a vocabulary of over 800 words, to whom Elizabeth reads literature all the time, and who picks up her 5-year-old daughter from school every day. Garmus gives the dog human-like abilities and thoughts. It’s absolutely endearing how Six-Thirty refers to Elizabeth’s baby in her mom’s womb as “the creature”, and how he cares for her. “The dog pressed his head against her thigh begging her not to go any further.” Or how he keeps a running commentary on human behaviour: “Humans were strange Six-Thirty thought. The way they constantly battled dirt when they were above ground, but after death willingly entombed themselves in it. At the funeral he couldn’t believe the amount of dirt needed to cover…coffin and when he saw the size of the shovel he’d wondered if he should offer the help of his back legs to cover the hole.”
Bonnie Garmus, who worked as a copywriter for years, is a master of packing punches with language. She’s concise, candid and witty. In an interview with The Guardian she says she was inspired to write the book after a particularly frustrating meeting at the advertising company she worked for, in which she gave a presentation to male colleagues, had her ideas appropriated by one of them, and was put down as a woman to boot. She wrote the first chapter of the book on that very same day!
Lessons in Chemistry is so meaningfully entertaining that despite being a debut novel it was number 1 on the New York Times, Sunday Times and Der Spiegel best-seller lists, has won multiple awards, has been translated into 42 languages, and turned into a TV miniseries of the same name starring Brie Larson as Elizabeth Zott.
Alternate Perspective 