After Emily Read online

  AFTER EMILY

  TWO REMARKABLE WOMEN

  AND THE LEGACY OF AMERICA’S

  GREATEST POET

  JULIE DOBROW

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York • London

  For my parents and my grandmother, who first taught me to believe that

  “There is no frigate like a book To take us lands away”

  Biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the biographied

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  CONTENTS

  1886 Map of Amherst

  Preface

  INTRODUCTIONOne Fine Day in May (1886)

  CHAPTER 1Arriving in Amherst (1856–1881)

  CHAPTER 2Meeting and Courting the Dickinsons (1881–1882)

  CHAPTER 3Soaring Love and Seething Tensions (1883–1894)

  CHAPTER 4Dickinsonian Inspiration: Mabel’s Creative Output (1883–1893)

  CHAPTER 5Lingering Puritanism and Millicent’s Sensibilities (1884–1897)

  CHAPTER 6Embracing Emily’s Poems (1886–1897)

  CHAPTER 7Losing Austin, Finding Mabel (1895–1904)

  CHAPTER 8Suing the “Queen of Amherst” (1897–1898)

  CHAPTER 9Traveling and Travails (1899–1917)

  CHAPTER 10“Sincerely, Joe Thomas” (1918–1919)

  CHAPTER 11Fighting to Define Emily Dickinson (1920–1929)

  CHAPTER 12Bringing Lost Poems to Light (1930–1939)

  CHAPTER 13Dealing with “Dickinsoniana” (1940–1955)

  CHAPTER 14Battling over Emily’s Papers (1946–1959)

  CHAPTER 15Seeking Closure and Meaning (1960–1968)

  CHAPTER 16Unpacking the Camphorwood Chest

  AFTERWORDSorting through the Clutter

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Text Credits

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  1886 MAP OF AMHERST WITH ANNOTATIONS

  PREFACE

  “The most positively brilliant life”

  Emily Dickinson is perhaps the most beloved and the most puzzling of all American poets. Just as she held the world at arm’s length during her life, so has she revealed little of her true self since her death in 1886—despite the devotion of countless biographical and literary detectives. As her words once prophesied:

  So we must keep apart,

  You there, I here,

  With just the door ajar

  That oceans are,

  And prayer,

  And that pale sustenance,

  Despair!1

  The outlines of the poet’s life are fairly well-known. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, came into life as the second child of Edward Dickinson and his wife, Emily Norcross. The Dickinson family had deep roots in Amherst, their forebears having been among the original settlers in neighboring Hadley. The Dickinsons were intensively engaged in local civic affairs; Edward even became immersed in state and national politics, elected to terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and later in the U.S. Congress as a member of the Whig Party. Affluent (though they had endured a period of economic instability), integrally tied to Amherst College (which Emily’s grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, helped to found) and heavily invested in the cultural capital of the day, the Dickinson family commanded respect and admiration.

  Bookended by brother William Austin (known as Austin), older by a year, and sister Lavinia (Vinnie), three years younger, Emily grew up in a household that valued independence, literature and the natural world. Biographer Richard Sewall suggests that while Emily was reared within a family and a community still clenched by their Puritan roots, Emily, herself, broke from its grip. Her “sense of the past . . . could hardly be called vivid,” he writes. Emily rejected the orthodoxy of the many religious revivals sweeping the region. She developed a caustic wit that often led her to question authority. And yet, as Sewall points out, young Emily linked a sense of wonder with the Puritan value of intellectual rigor. She embraced the Puritan tenets of hard work, practicality and intensity of purpose. “She was prepared to accept the loneliness of such a course, a loneliness endemic in the New England Puritan way and intensified by her own peculiar defections.”2

  Emily’s immediate family bounded and defined her world. Her relationship with her father was complicated: when she was a child, Edward’s strict, sometimes authoritarian manner led Emily to fear his reproach, but as a young woman, to rebel from or even to poke fun at his Puritan-derived ways. Yet she also deeply respected her father’s dedication to family, community and country, as well as his intellect. As Sewall writes, Emily’s nuanced understanding of Edward was perhaps never more poignantly expressed than in a letter to family friend Joseph Bardwell Lyman, in which she explained her father as “the oldest and the oddest sort of a foreigner,” someone caught between his work and his family though fully in touch with neither, a man whose life had “passed in a wilderness or on an island.”3

  Her relationship with her mother and siblings was perhaps more clear-cut and less conflicted. By most accounts, Emily Norcross Dickinson’s life centered on her home and her gardens, and she had little interest in discussing politics, philosophy or literature of the day. Indeed, her namesake daughter once wrote that her mother “does not care for thought.” Both girls were committed to Emily Norcross, nonetheless, caring for her in sickness and never leaving her.

  Emily’s relationship with Austin was extremely close when the two were young; they shared a consciousness of kind. Many of their early letters show the pair exchanged thoughts about their parents and sister, their community, ideas about philosophy and nature. After Austin married his relationship with Emily changed, but she remained dedicated to enabling his happiness in the ways she could. While no less deep than her relationship with Austin, Emily’s relationship with her sister differed in significant ways. Despite the dissimilarities in personality (Vinnie was ebullient, highly social and, as Sewall notes, “never noted for her profundity”) and interests (Vinnie was neither a serious student nor a writer), Emily’s connection with her sister was constant, loyal and dependent. She once described the bond between them as “indissoluble.” Lavinia both revered and respected her older sister and would remain faithfully devoted to her.

  Emily received formal education at the Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847. She then joined the ranks of middle-class nineteenth-century women who went on to college and spent a year studying at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary when she was seventeen. She left for unknown reasons (thought having to do either with her physical or emotional health), but Emily’s informal education continued at home. Emily Dickinson—voracious reader, precise recorder of nature, enthusiastic cultivator of flowers and herbs, stalwart baker of breads and cakes—observed the world around her with unusual acuity and insight.

  Though Emily’s life centered on her family, she maintained a circle of friends close by and correspondents, afar. Her circle enlarged with trips to Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia in 1855, and to Boston in 1864 and 1865. Emily’s friends and acquaintances were both women and men: some of the most meaningful relationships included Susan Huntington Gilbert, who would become Emily’s sister-in-law when she married Austin in 1856; the Springfield Republican editor and Dickinson family friend Samuel Bowles; the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, with whom Emily corresponded though she met him on only a couple of occasions; and Judge Otis Phillips Lord, her father’s closest friend who developed an independent relationship with Emily late in his life. It’s not clear whether any of these relationships also involved romantic attachment, though numerous sources indicate that some of Emily’s letters, as well as references from family members in their correspondence, strongly suggest the relationshi
p with Judge Lord had a romantic element to it. What is clear is that by the late 1860s, Emily Dickinson’s contacts with people other than her immediate family occurred more through the written word than through the spoken one. She began the reclusion that would characterize the rest of her life.

  By the end of that decade she barely left the confines of her own home. Neither she nor Lavinia ever married. After both of their parents died, the sisters spent the remainder of their lives living together in their cavernous family home. During the final years of her life the number of people Emily actually saw in person further dwindled, and yet she maintained significant connection to those with whom she did engage. The intensity of emotion expressed in many of Emily’s letters, including the so-called Master letters, reveal other sides of a woman whose outwardly simple and reclusive life belied the complexities that lay within. Scholars have long debated whether these three passionate and highly stylized missives to an unnamed recipient addressed only as “dear Master,” were written to a particular person and if so, what his or her identity was. It’s believed that these letters were written between 1858 and 1861. It is not known whether versions of them were ever sent. Some scholars and literary analysts insist that the intended recipient was, in fact, Judge Lord. But others suggest it was Reverend Charles Wadsworth, while some name Samuel Bowles. Still others believe that “Master” was scientist William Smith Clark, or Dr. George Gould, a minister and Amherst classmate of Austin’s. And some posit that Susan Dickinson was actually the intended recipient of the “Master letters.”4

  The mysteries surrounding “Master’s” identity and whether he or she ever knew the intensity of Emily’s feelings remain unresolved. But these letters, along with the extent of the poet’s correspondence with others outside her immediate family, and her avid reading of local and national events in contemporary newspapers and journals as evidenced by references in her letters, demonstrate that it would be incorrect to think of Emily Dickinson as someone completely isolated. The limits to Emily’s world were largely self-imposed, the edges ones she defined. She navigated through her choices in life in ways few of us are able to control so pristinely. Even though her life is well documented by biographies and literary analyses, the impetus behind Emily’s reclusion remains elusive.

  Emily began writing poetry as a teenager. Though she didn’t date her poems, many scholars believe that she began writing serious and highly stylized poetry in the late 1850s. Sometime around 1858, she began collecting her poems and sewing them into small packets. In all, she wrote nearly eighteeen hundred poems. It’s believed that few people were aware of her prodigious poetic production, much less its genius. Her sister-in-law, Sue, certainly knew of Emily’s talent, as Emily shared with her more than two hundred poems. Another person who knew of Emily’s poetic gifts was Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Higginson, whose importance in late nineteenth-century America emanated from his work as a Unitarian minister, his leadership of a regiment composed of freed African American soldiers during the Civil War and his advocacy of abolition and women’s rights, was also a leading literary figure. Emily reached out to him in 1862, sending him a letter and several poems. This led to two visits and a correspondence that lasted until the end of her life.

  During her lifetime a dozen of Emily’s poems appeared in print in various newspapers and collections of poetry. None of the poems were published under her name; in fact, many scholars do not believe that Emily was aware of their publication. It wasn’t until after the poet’s death at the age of fifty-five that Lavinia discovered the huge cache of poems and became determined to share them all with the world.

  These are the outlines of the poet’s life. But a biographical entry in one of the many publications recounting great poets or classic American writers, or a Wikipedia post, tell only so much. We have been puzzling over Emily Dickinson—her being, her secrets, her essence—ever since the publication of the initial book of her poems in 1890 first jolted us into awareness. The layering of a life quietly lived, the motivations inspiring a sparkling brilliance, remain mysterious, shadowed, occasionally illuminating from behind her door. We wonder what happened, after Emily.

  Who was Emily Dickinson? A shape-shifter confronts us as scholars and acolytes, though we continue to seek answers: How much of the poet’s life can we discern from her poetry? Which of the many word and phrasing possibilities she offered did she truly intend in her poems? Why did she partially secede from the world? Did she really wear only white? Can anyone ever truly know Emily Dickinson?

  Perhaps two women came closest to understanding the enigmatic poet: Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter Millicent Todd Bingham, the women arguably most responsible for bringing Emily Dickinson to the world through their editing and publishing of her poems and letters, as well as their scholarly analysis of her work. As of this writing, neither Mabel nor Millicent has before been the subject of a full-length biography, and each of them led fascinating lives. By elucidating Mabel’s and Millicent’s stories, I hope also to shed new light on how Dickinson’s work was presented to the public and the effect their efforts had on Emily’s enduring legacies. Understanding their own stories and influences, as well as their complicated mother/daughter relationship, helps push Emily’s door ajar a bit farther.

  Mabel’s and Millicent’s considerable work on Emily Dickinson began to shape both the image of the poet and the contours of her poetry as we know it today. Mabel edited and published three volumes of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and two volumes of her letters, as well as a reissue of the letters at the centennial of the poet’s birth. Millicent was responsible for editing and publishing one additional volume of poetry, and wrote three other books about the poet’s craft and life. During her lifetime, Mabel worked tirelessly to promote Emily’s poetry, which included carefully honed marketing campaigns and innumerable public talks about the poet intended to build intrigue and promote sales. Millicent, as heir to her mother’s unfinished Dickinson business and all of the original Dickinson manuscripts in her possession, found herself in the improbable position of navigating between high-powered forces fueled by long-simmering internecine tensions; her tortured decisions ultimately meant that Emily’s papers reside in different repositories across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

  That Emily Dickinson’s poetry first came to be published in 1890 in a volume coedited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson is relatively well known; the stories behind it are not. And these stories help to broaden the world of Emily Dickinson by illuminating the lives of others central to her universe. Mabel’s work editing and promoting Emily’s poetry not only cast her public image but also figured into a complicated web of relationships between members of the Dickinson family and the Todds whose animosities have lasted for generations. And importantly, the narrative of “Emily Dickinson’s literary debut” (as Millicent would later refer to it) is inextricably linked to the narratives of Mabel and Millicent, themselves. Mabel’s and Millicent’s Dickinson work became a driving and significant force for each of them, so central that it irrevocably recast their professional directions, so powerful that it irreversibly altered their personal lives.

  By seeing events through the minds of Mabel and Millicent as revealed in their own words, a new context for the life and times of Emily Dickinson emerges. Mabel first learned of Emily Dickinson when she arrived in Amherst in the early 1880s. She later came to know the woman known as “the Amherst myth” through her close associations with the Dickinson family, including her life-altering relationship with Austin, which roiled everyone in both families. We better understand, in light of this, how Emily’s sister, Lavinia, came to entrust the publication of her poems to Mabel—then later betrayed this trust and launched a lawsuit that became a much gossiped-about scandal. We see how Millicent was shaped by her mother’s affair and larger-than-life persona, and how they ultimately hewed the path not only to Millicent’s work on Dickinson but also to her inability to find true love and career clarity. We r
ealize in turn how Millicent’s own discontents influenced her readings of Emily. We learn how the personal relationships each woman had affected her outlook on life—and her understanding of Dickinson. We comprehend that other aspects of Mabel’s and Millicent’s lives—Mabel’s passion for music and writing, Millicent’s precision and scientific rigor, the world travels each undertook—not only enriched their own lives and made them rare among female peers of their respective eras but also inspired their crafting of Emily Dickinson.

  But perhaps most importantly, by more fully articulating these women’s inner lives, we can see various ways their worldviews affected their editing and interpretations of Dickinson’s work. The resonances Mabel and Millicent felt with Emily—all outsiders, all obsessed with writing about the meaning of nature and human experience, all women pushing up against the boundaries of their times—suggest new insights into why Emily’s work was important to them and how they portrayed both the poet and her poems.

  Mabel Loomis Todd’s revising, ordering and titling of Dickinson’s poems and her regularizing of Dickinson’s punctuation in her poetry have long been contested among literary scholars and Dickinson fans. The ways in which Mabel altered spellings, gave some poems names, grouped them thematically rather than chronologically and at times even changed words to make lines that might have scanned or rhymed better but which possibly altered their meaning, have been the subject of many an academic debate. But the clever and cutting-edge ways in which Mabel designed and marketed the early volumes of Dickinson’s poetry—ensuring that these brilliant works that defied most conventions of nineteenth-century verse actually sold out in their first editions and went through several printings—have almost never been recognized or discussed.

  These new perspectives are possible only because of the enormous reservoir of previously unmined and unpublished papers that both Mabel and Millicent left behind. Neither woman ever threw out a single scrap of paper; indeed, one of the major ongoing themes of the final three decades of Millicent’s life was her tormented quest to figure out what to do with all the STUFF—the hundreds upon hundreds of boxes of saved letters, diaries, journals, scrapbooks and photographs that had scrupulously recorded the lives of her grandparents, her parents and herself.