"Roffman (West Point) analyzes four US writers--Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Marianne Moore, and Ruth Benedict--devoting a chapter to each. Although these modernists never met, the author unites them through their associations with American libraries and museums. In her introduction, Roffman presents a history of US cultural institutions and argues that they systematized knowledge to shape public opinion. The chapter on Wharton closely examines The Age of Innocence, particularly the scenes that occur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which Wharton's uncle had been president. In the Larsen and Moore chapters, Roffman connects the authors' employment as New York librarians to their writing. For Larsen, systems of knowledge were often systems of exclusion. For Moore, who was also an assistant to Melville Dewey (the creator of the Dewey Decimal System), systemization of knowledge was both appealing and restraining. Benedict is best known as a pioneering cultural anthropologist, and Roffman presents her poetry as countering her scholarly career and its institutions. The details of this study are fascinating, but because the four authors differ greatly, the thesis is expansive. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduates students, researchers."

“This book has, at its heart, a smart and illuminating thesis about women modernists’ complex engagement with and analyses of various modern cultural and educational institutions.”---Francesca Sawaya, associate professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing, 1890-1950