Women’s Libraries and “Women’s Books”, 1729–1830

Abstract

During the eighteenth century, as the practice of selling books at auction spread throughout Europe, moving beyond its original Dutch origins to the rest of the continent, an increasing number of female-owned libraries were also sold at auction. These sales were accompanied by printed catalogues that, together with widespread discourses about women’s reading, helped construct new images of the female reader. During the same period, a new ideal type of female-gendered library was conceptualized, the bibliothèque choisie, that foregrounded personal reading taste and belles-lettres, and was sometimes associated with historical, real female readers. This essay explores the historical reality of the discursively imagined woman reader, using bibliometric tools to examine a corpus of auction catalogues of smaller and medium-sized female-owned libraries or bibliothèques choisies sold in France, the Dutch Republic and British Isles between 1729 and 1830. Adopting a geographically comparative perspective, I study the historical evolution of these female-owned libraries, focusing particularly on women as readers of devotional literature and of novels. I demonstrate that while women’s libraries did differ perceptibly from men’s libraries, these differences were sometimes subtler than inherited narratives might suggest, and require rich contextualization taking into account multiple geographic, social, and material factors.