In Great Britain, until the last quarter of the 20th century, there were relatively few women booksellers, and they struggled to reach leading positions in a professional environment whose codes and practices were dictated by men. In the 1940s, Christina Foyle inherited Foyle’s, “the world’s largest bookshop”, founded by her father and uncle at the beginning of the century. She ran it until her death in the late 1990s, at a time when the book trade was undergoing profound changes, and she has usually been blamed for its decline. Drawing on the British Library’s oral archives, this article retraces her unique life course and focuses on the way she was perceived by her contemporaries, in order to examine the impact of gender norms on her career. To a certain extent, she managed to break away from these norms, partly because her social status allowed her to cultivate her difference, something that the majority of women booksellers were not able to do.