Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
November 1, 2005 – January 31, 2006

A Book of Her Own

This exhibition takes its title and inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s  A Room of One’s Own, an essay in which she presents her thoughts on a variety of topics related to women and literature. One of Woolf’s principal conclusions is that for women to succeed as writers they need their own space – physical, psychological, and metaphorical – for writing. A private space free from domestic cares or labors where they can devote themselves, undisturbed, to writing: A room of their own with “a lock on the door” to keep out children and husbands. Woolf also argues that financial independence is a pre-requisite for  women writers. But economic considerations were not her only concern. A third point she stresses, and the one that informs the present exhibition, is the difficulty that women writers before the nineteenth century faced “when they came to set their thoughts on paper…that they had no tradition behind them.” A writer needs books. Or to put it another way, a woman writer needs a room, and that room must be one with books in it, a library.

This exhibition is about the libraries of medieval and early modern European women, or more specifically the books that were in those libraries. Woolf expresses her frustration at the lack of information available about the lives of women before the eighteenth century and calls for a re-writing of the history of this period, focusing on the role of women, in particular of middle-class women. “A Book of Her Own” addresses one aspect of the history of women in the early period – the books that they owned. This is an exhibition of artifacts, the actual volumes that were owned by women in the early period, volumes in which they tell us, often in their own words and their own handwriting, that the books belonged to them. Some of the books come from convent libraries or the libraries of individual nuns; others belonged to aristocratic women. The great majority were owned by middle-class women; their inscriptions in these books are in some cases the only records of their lives and interests.

Several types of evidence for female ownership were considered in the selection of material for this show. Most of the volumes bear an inscription comprised of a woman’s name and her declaration of ownership. Other volumes bear only a woman’s name. Books containing gift inscriptions indicating a woman’s ownership are also included; and there are books with coats-of-arms and other visual evidence, such as portraits of the woman who commissioned the volume. Additionally, there are books that have been altered by their owners to make texts originally intended for masculine readers appropriate to an exclusively female audience. In these cases female ownership is clear, but the identity of the specific women owners is not known to us.

The books on exhibition were identified by a team of researchers, combing the stacks of the Library for many years, examining tens of thousands of volumes to find those with the ownership notes of women. The diversity of material highlights the range of the Yale Library’s resources for the study of women and literature in the early period. Books are included from the collections of the Beinecke Library, the Elizabethan Club, the Music Library, and the Lewis Walpole Library. The continuing investigation of these books, and the identification of further volumes at Yale and elsewhere, should add to our understanding of the intellectual interests of medieval and early modern women, provide insights into the lives and pursuits of these otherwise forgotten women, and contribute to the writing of new chapters in book history, library history, and literary reception.

This exhibition was curated by Robert Babcock with the collaboration of three Yale graduate students, Torrence Thomas, D. Marshall Kibbey, and Elizabeth Archibald. An illustrated catalogue is available at the Beinecke reception desk for $15.