Marianne Moore’s copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Chicago: M. A. Donohue & Co., ca. 1906); Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia (MML 0166). Studio portrait of Marianne Moore by Alice Boughton (1866–1943), 1920; Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia (2006.5017; Moore XII:02:35a). When the American poet Marianne Moore (1887–1972) picked up this copy of Charlotte Brontë’s …

Vicki Mahaffey has been teaching and writing about James Joyce for decades, at the Rosenbach but also at University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. And yet she has more to say on the topic. Her new book, The Joyce of Everyday Life (Bucknell University Press), feels like a book Joyce himself might have …

On the stairwell of the Rosenbach Museum & Library’s historic house hangs a portrait of a woman and her child (1954.1882). The woman’s elbow rests on a plush sofa while the child combs her mother’s dark hair. The identity of the woman has long been a source of confusion, and our limited documentation on the …