Duke University Acquires the Sarah Westphal Collection

Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has announced that it has acquired the Sarah Westphal Collection. The collection includes hundreds of books that were written, printed, illustrated or published by women some dating back to the seventeenth century. Included in the collection a first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which was published in 1792.

Dr. Westphal stated that the collection is “anything and all things that women published or were interested in, especially in the eighteenth century.” The collection ranges from literature for children and adults to science, cookery, travel writing, prescriptive literature, political and philosophical treatises, biographies of women by women, and works by women printers and artists.

Professor Westphal taught in the department of Germanic languages and literature and was an affiliated faculty member of the program in women’s studies at Duke from 1983 to 1986. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University.