So Many 'House of Mirth' Puns, So Little Time

This week's New Yorker has an interesting piece on the disaster that is the Mount, the Lenox, MA estate built by Edith Wharton (I would link to it, but Conde Nast is finnicky about which articles they put online).

Fun fact: I almost did an internship there! The deciding factor in not taking it was living in Lenox for the summer, which might've driven me (even more) crazy, but I'm especially glad I said no now that I'm aware of what a mess the whole business is. Basically, for those of you who aren't going to read the article, no one wanted to go to the Mount, so to increase historical cache they purchased Wharton's original library for several million dollars, which no one at the time understood was a loan, and now they can't pay it back, which is sort of perfect when one considers the current foreclosure spree.

Anyway. Stephanie Copeland, the focus of the article, is no doubt a very intelligent woman, well-trained to do any number of things. Unfortunately, running a historical estate/museum is not one of them, and therein lies one of my biggest problems with the state of historical societies and smallish museums right now. Places like the Mount get shafted because of the assumption that they're the domain of wealthy white women, many of whom haven't a clue about how to actually navigate the often incredibly thorny path between maintaining a sense of historical integrity and creating an economically sustainable business. I certainly hope the Mount's board is able to find a way out, but I also hope it makes historians and preservationists realize that what they're doing right now just isn't working, and that serious changes are going to be necessary if we'd like to continue to actually, like, keep things like historical estates open, which, come to think of it, might not even matter because does anyone besides me really want to visit the guest bedroom often occupied by Henry James?