Ken's Korner: Edith Wharton’s library is returning to America

Ken’s Korner: Edith Wharton’s library is returning to America – The Journal of Antiques and Collectibles – February 2006
In 1911, while her marriage was unraveling, the American author Edith Wharton left the United States for good and went to live in France. Now, nearly a century later, Wharton’s 2,600-volume library has been purchased for $2.6 million by the Mount — the writer’s former estate, in Lenox, Mass. — and will finally be coming home. The seller was George Ramsden, a British bookseller who bought most of the library in 1984 for $80,000 and has spent the intervening years cataloguing it.
The library provides a window into the world of a woman who went from Edith Jones to Mrs. Edward Wharton to Edith Wharton, the internationally famous author of books like “Problems of Power,” “America and the World War,” “The Golden Bowl” and “The Decoration of Houses.” Many of her novels depicted the opulent world of old New York, with footmen and bejeweled grandes dames. The purchase of the library was financed by a loan from a mysterious and anonymous benefactor.
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