Belle da Costa Greene attained the unlikely position of managing the renowned library of J. P. Morgan. In an era when few women had careers, this was remarkable. More remarkable was the fact that Belle secretly descended from African-Americans, a fact she took pains to hide because it would have meant the end of her career and social aspirations. Ardizzone's biography conjures the sweep of her extraordinary life: her warm but combative relationship with her employer, her trips to Europe, her secret abortion. In the process, it conveys upper-class life in early twentieth-century New England.