About the collection

The Marguerite Hicks Collection is one of the first intentional collections of works by and about women from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to be gathered by an American collector. In 1971 Oakland University’s Kresge Library purchased the collection of 900+ items of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century books, printed materials, and manuscripts by and about British women writers from Marguerite Bieber Hicks, who started building her collection in the 1930s. The Collection features broadsides, novels, cookbooks, political tracts, educational texts, sermons, plays, poetry, and more. Dozens of the items in this collection exist in fewer than ten known copies worldwide, and a handful are uniquely existing copies. The Marguerite Hicks Collection is used in exhibits and research and instruction for undergraduate, graduate, and faculty research across the disciplines at Oakland University.