Blanche Knopf (née Wolf) was the less-acknowledged half of the driving force behind the prestigious publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, which just celebrated its centennial. In THE LADY WITH THE BORZOI, author Laura Claridge delves deeply into the private life and hectic professional demands of an ambitious publisher who did her utmost to prevent her personal needs and era’s social constraints from having an effect on the success of her business.

Blanche Knopf was just over 20 years old when she founded Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. with the firm’s namesake and her husband, music and history lover Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. Despite her relative youth, Mrs. Knopf showed an innate literary acumen that served her well from the firm’s advent until her death in 1966. The book is rich with literary history across the United States and Western Europe over this 50-year period. Claridge reviews the courting periods and continued attentions Blanche lavished on the varied literati in her coterie, which included high-profile authors and poets such as Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, Raymond Chandler, John Updike, John Hersey and Langston Hughes.

"THE LADY WITH THE BORZOI leaves readers with a strong impression of Blanche Knopf as a breath of fresh (if sometimes baffling) air for most who encountered her."

Naturally, like most histories of the people behind great institutions, much of the drama lies in Blanche’s personal life. A firecracker with a penchant for dramatic clothes and an ability to make anyone feel welcome at her society affairs, Blanche was often at odds with her grumpy, less socially capable husband. Their initial attraction blossomed due to their mutual appreciation of the written word, but their continued relationship seems maintained throughout their lifetimes mainly through their professional partnership. Though both clearly admired the other’s talents, Claridge makes clear just how ill-suited the two were for one another. Passages of the book are devoted to the couple’s mutual mistreatment: Alfred’s played out mostly through displays of sometimes violent antagonism and carelessness towards his wife, while hers is expressed more frequently via varied and long-lasting affairs.

Blanche’s ambivalence towards motherhood, her professional ambition and her unhealthy obsession with skinniness paint a very modern portrait of a woman struggling to fit into the place society tells her is where she belongs. Claridge paints a sympathetic but relatively clear-eyed portrait of her subject. It would have been easy to fall into the trap of showing Blanche as she was seen by her many admirers: courageous, before her time, and, above all, possessing a gracious mien. But Claridge’s careful research brings readers face to face with some of her less beguiling behavior: catty retaliations at dinner parties, a long-term standoffishness towards her (admittedly difficult and unreliable) son, and taking off to Europe to visit new authors and acquaintances instead of staying near family with just a few months to live. Instead, the great shortcoming of the book is Claridge’s refusal to step outside the chronological ordering of Mrs. Knopf’s datebook, which grows tedious as names and dates cycle through again and again without much apparent impact.

THE LADY WITH THE BORZOI leaves readers with a strong impression of Blanche Knopf as a breath of fresh (if sometimes baffling) air for most who encountered her. One of my favorite moments comes from a journalist’s report of seeing Blanche appear with her usual panache just a few weeks after V-Day. “I knew the war was over,” he wrote, “when [she] turned up in Paris.”