Two beloved novelists shed light on another notable partnership—between J.P. Morgan and his librarian, a captivating woman with a big secret.

“What has this got to do with me?” wondered Victoria Christopher Murray. The award-winning author of more than 20 novels had received a request from historical novelist Marie Benedict to collaborate on a novel. Murray quickly glanced at the first page of the pitch, which described financier J.P. Morgan’s opulent New York City library. She chuckled, thinking, “The only thing I have in common [with him] is a Chase account”—referring to the modern-day banking company with historical ties to Morgan.

Weeks later, when Murray’s literary agent pestered her to take a closer look at Benedict’s proposal, Murray’s attitude changed. Morgan’s librarian, a woman named Belle da Costa Greene, was one of the most important librarians in American history. She was also a Black woman who passed as white. Greene’s father was the first Black graduate of Harvard College as well as a professor, diplomat and prominent racial justice activist. Once Murray digested this new information, she quickly got in touch with Benedict.

“I feel like she chose us and we did a good job, and now she’s just sitting there with her arms folded, tapping her foot, waiting for the book to come out.”

Their resulting collaboration, The Personal Librarian, imagines the sacrifices and struggles that Greene surely endured to protect her secret. Benedict and Murray’s teamwork also produced a deep, enduring friendship, and the two writers now call themselves sisters. As we chat via Zoom—with Murray in Washington, D.C., and Benedict in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—their admiration for each other is evident, as is their esteem for Greene.

“I feel her presence a lot,” Murray says. “I can’t believe how much I still think about her. I feel like she chose us and we did a good job, and now she’s just sitting there with her arms folded, tapping her foot, waiting for the book to come out.” Benedict agrees, adding that of all the women she’s written about—Agatha Christie, Hedy Lamarr, Clementine Churchill and others—Greene is the one she’d most like to meet.

Greene ran the Morgan Library for 43 years, first helping Morgan to amass an important collection of rare books and manuscripts and, after his death in 1913, transforming his private collection into a public resource. “As time went on,” Benedict says, “Belle and J.P. became closer and closer, just like Victoria and me. Their relationship really defied description.”

Like Morgan, Greene was extremely charismatic. “It’s hard for us to convey how much of a celebrity she really was,” Benedict says. Greene ran in multiple social circles and had numerous affairs. She was known for her flamboyant fashion, famously saying, “Just because I am a librarian doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Personal Librarian.

Once on board with the novel, Murray brought a whole new perspective to Greene’s story. During one of their earliest meetings, the two writers made a quick stop at the Morgan Library. Benedict knew the space well; it had been a place of refuge when she worked as a corporate lawyer for more than 10 years before turning to fiction. She describes its stunning interior as being like a jewel box. However, this was Murray’s first visit. As she looked around Morgan’s study, she pointed to an oil painting and said, “What is that Black man doing up there?”

Benedict had never noticed the portrait of a Moorish ambassador to the Venetian court, painted around 1600. But the ambassador bore a resemblance to Greene’s father, and the authors began to speculate that Greene bought the portrait as an homage to him. “That is something that I would have never seen without Victoria,” Benedict says. “And in many ways, as time went on, that really became a symbol of Belle. Here she was, this African American woman in the room that nobody saw.”

“And I think that’s why she put the painting there,” Murray says. “One of the themes that Marie and I put in the book was that Belle was hiding in plain sight.”

Both writers agree that Morgan likely had suspicions about Greene’s race that he chose to ignore. “He didn’t want to be known in society as the man who had been duped by a Black woman,” Murray says. She describes showing a photograph of Greene to her friends, who responded with surprise. “How did she pass?” they asked. “How in the world did that happen?”

Such questions, inherent to the creation of the novel, sparked a childhood memory for Murray of a time when her younger sister looked at a photograph on their mantle and asked, “Who is that white woman?” It was their grandmother, who on at least one occasion had passed as white during a train trip from North Carolina to New York. “Writing this book, I really began to understand what that must’ve been like,” Murray says.

“As time went on, Belle and J.P. became closer and closer, just like Victoria and me. Their relationship really defied description.”

Greene burned her personal papers before she died, no doubt to protect her secret, so much must be imagined about her life. But as daunting a task as re-creating her story may have been, the two authors render it with gusto, from Greene’s defiant wit to the drama and danger that surrounded her.

The success of Benedict and Murray’s partnership is in part due to a difficult reality: surviving a pandemic while coping with the horror of George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s murders in 2020. They spent hours on Zoom each day, often discussing race issues vital to both their novel and current events. The experience sent them on a “fast track to sisterhood," they agree.

“I think it was a gift for me to work with an author who was not African American,” Murray says, “because I got to see all kinds of perspectives. I had wider eyes. We hope that African American book clubs and white book clubs will get together and talk about our book together the same way [Marie] and I did.”

Benedict chimes in, “During her lifetime, Belle knew that her story couldn't be told because it might eviscerate the impact of her legacy. But now we're at a point where her legacy can be known and celebrated. It’s time.”

Benedict author photo by Anthony Musmanno 2020. Murray photo by Jason Frost Photography 2020.

Maggie Shipstead often finds herself in far-flung places such as Italy, Romania, the Himalayas, Antarctica and the South Pacific. Sometimes she goes just for fun, but often it’s in service of her work as a travel writer and novelist. She’s especially drawn to desolate landscapes and polar regions, though she admits that getting there poses a bit of an ethical concern. “You have to burn a lot of carbon,” the author says, “but I do think when people see [these places], they better understand [their] fragility and importance.”

Shipstead on the Greeland ice sheet

But when we speak on the phone about her latest novel, Great Circle, she’s at home in California, her dog Gus sitting attentively by her side as she reorganizes a giant pile of books: a pandemic project. Like most of us, the bestselling author has been grounded for the last year or so, with any adventures taking place on a TV screen, in the pages of a book or in the landscape of the mind.

The good news is that Great Circle is anything but earthbound. Instead, fearless aviator Marian Graves takes readers high into the sky over the course of decades, culminating in an attempt to fly around the globe by way of the North and South poles. Over the course of her eventful life, she soars above mountains and rivers, navigating her way through personal triumphs, tragedies and treacherously opaque clouds. Every choice she makes is in pursuit of independence, seeking freedom from oppressive sexism, from the pain of World War II, from a world that tries to dictate her identity.

“I’m so happy in my little hidey-hole; why am I going to the Canadian High Arctic?”

“A life is inherently epic, and Marian’s life is epic in a more tangible way,” Shipstead says of her brilliant and intrepid pilot. Marian’s story is indeed rife with the thrill of discovery, the drama of making one’s way in a hostile world and the poignancy of loving someone without the guarantee of forever. It’s also something of a mystery, as readers learn early on that, like Amelia Earhart, obscurity and supposition surround Marian’s final flight. As Shipstead explains, disappearance and death are perceived very differently, “even though they’re often the same thing.”

Capturing and creating Marian’s life took several years, as Shipstead conducted extensive research on everything from 1920s bootlegging air routes to what it’s like to camp on an Antarctic glacier. She traveled to many of the novel’s key locations and even spent 30 seconds at the controls of a small plane. “I did not enjoy it.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Great Circle.

Great Circle was a massive undertaking: The first draft was 980 pages, comprising 300,000 words and printed on two reams of paper. Shipstead explains that her first two novels, 2012’s Seating Arrangements and 2014’s Astonish Me, were both “short stories that I tried to revise, and instead they blorped out into books. This was the first time I was like, all right, I’m starting a novel.”

Shipstead points to “a very identifiable moment” that led her to write Great Circle. At New Zealand’s Auckland Airport, she noticed a bronze statue of aviator Jean Batten, who in 1936 became the first person to fly solo from London to New Zealand. Its plaque includes a quotation from Batten—“I was destined to be a wanderer”—which inspired the novel’s opening line.

“I was at the airport feeling this bittersweet sense of failure about a project that had abandoned me,” Shipstead says, “and I was very open to some sort of spark of an idea. I’d also just had this adventurous time, was interested in adventurous lives, and it all fell into place.”

Shipstead with an elephant seal in New Zealand’s subantarctic Macquarie Island

The final version of Great Circle unspools across more than 600 pages, and this expansiveness allows other richly realized characters to tell their stories, too—in particular, Marian’s twin, Jamie, and childhood friend Caleb. In a shorter book, these characters would be merely tantalizing, introduced and then banished, victims of a restrictive page count. But in Great Circle, their inner worlds add context and reveal Marian’s far-reaching impact, for better or worse.

The unspoken and undocumented parts of a historical figure’s life can create an irresistible aura of mystery for the people who, generations later, seek to understand them—especially when the figure did nearly impossible things, edging up to death or even falling over that particular cliff. Marian’s story is interspersed with scenes from 2014, when Hadley Baxter is preparing to play the aviator in an upcoming movie. The gig seems like just the thing to redirect Hadley’s career after many years as the star of a blockbuster film franchise. Ravenous press, Harvey Weinstein-esque executives and demanding fans have taken a toll as well. “They scraped away at us, made us into something ransacked and empty,” Hadley muses.

But Hadley’s celebrity allows her to grasp one of the novel’s core tenets: the truth of a life. “She knows intuitively that no one can know the truth except you, and you barely know it,” Shipstead says. “One of the purposes of her narrative was showing the game of telephone that happens, even with someone who leaves behind clues to their life.”

Hadley’s interest in Marian grows into fascination as the aviator becomes less of a role and more of a role model. And as Marian’s storyline progresses, the reader is drawn ever closer to her final flight, suffusing Great Circle with a delicious inherent tension.

“What is the magnitude of one life? And what is the scale of one life versus the scale of this planet we live on?”

“Part of what motivated me [in writing the novel] was something Marian didn’t totally understand until she embarked on this flight,” Shipstead says. “By completing a circle, in a way you’re also rendering it futile. You finish it, and you’re back where you started, and it’s also stretching out in front of you all over again. . . . Now what?”

That pull toward a huge goal, that desire that informs a lifetime of choices, is something that intrigues Shipstead. It’s a thread that runs throughout her novel, looping around various characters and drawing them toward things that are thrilling but not always advisable. “In some ways,” she says, “there’s this ambient confusion around why we do things. It’s kind of an animating life force.” She doesn’t profess to know what’s at the heart of such an impulse, so in order to write the book, she had to accept that she’d never be able to pin it down.

Shipstead in Svalbard, Norway

“It’s funny, because in all accounts of early female pilots that I read, the vast majority—and I’m sure it’s the same thing for men—just seemed to know that [flying] is something they had to do,” Shipstead says. “While I don’t connect with wanting to fly planes, I do connect with it in terms of travel. With every trip, I dread going, in a way. I’m so happy in my little hidey-hole; why am I going to the Canadian High Arctic? But I still feel compelled to go, and I’m always glad that I go, and of course it irreversibly changes me.”

Such impossible questions are essential to Great Circle and build to a central preoccupation: “What is the magnitude of one life? And what is the scale of one life versus the scale of this planet we live on? How much can you pack into a life, and what do you choose to make your life about?” Shipstead says, “It’s all of these questions.”

Once readers have finished Great Circle and emerged from their own hidey-holes, blinking up at the sky and imagining Marian flying above, they’ll be glad to know that Shipstead has a short story collection planned for 2022. And when it’s safe to travel, she’ll be heading off to another faraway snowy landscape: Alaska. And so the circle continues.

All photos courtesy of the author