Emily Dickinson’s poems are identified by their Franklin number (F), the number assigned by R. W. Franklin in his The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Variorum edition. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). The numbers reflect Franklin’s estimate of the poems’ chronological order in Dickinson’s oeuvre. Dickinson’s letters are identified by the number assigned by editor Thomas H. Johnson in his The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958). The Johnson number (L) reflects his estimate of the letters’ chronological order.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1L268.
2F446.
3L972.
4L939.
5Suzanne Juhasz. “‘The Landscape of the Spirit’” in Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Judith Farr (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), 137.
6F690.
7George S. Merriam, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles, Vol. 1 (New York: The Century Co., 1885), 236.
8L281.
9Richard Wilbur, “Altitudes,” in Collected Poems, 1943–2004 (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2004), 305.
10L342a.
11L268.
ONE: ALL THINGS ABE READY
1Ebenezer Snell and Sabra Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College, Ebenezer Snell Papers, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.
2The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), L80.
3L6.
4L7; L184.
5Jay Leyda. The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 27.
6Ibid., 53.
7L7.
8Ibid.
9Ibid.
10Ibid.
11Ibid.
12L9.
13L5.
14Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 8.
15Leyda, vol. 1, 50.
16Ibid., 24.
17L2.
18L1.
19Leyda, vol. 1, 8, 56.
20Ibid., 81.
21Ibid., 31.
22L159.
23Leyda, vol. 1, 82.
24L116.
25L176.
26L133.
27Franklin and Hampshire Express, Friday, August 1, 1845.
28L827.
29L11.
30Leyda, vol. 1, 24; L6, L5.
31L6.
32Frederick Tuckerman, Amherst Academy: A New England School of the Past, 1814–1861, (Amherst: Printed for the Trustees, 1929), 103.
33Habegger, 143.
34Leyda, vol. 1, 29.
35L6.
36L8.
37L7.
38Leyda, vol. 1, 21.
39Leyda, vol. 1, 87.
40L7.
41Carolyn Lindley Cooley, The Music of Emily Dickinson’s Poems and Letters (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2003), 18.
42L184.
43Leyda, vol. 1, 59.
44L6.
45L3.
46L91.
47Ibid.
48Leyda, vol. 1, 81.
49L5.
50Tuckerman, 113.
51Leyda, vol. 1, 19
52Ibid., 36.
53Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 51.
54Ibid., 17.
55L6.
56Habegger, 171.
57Ibid.
58L11.
59Leyda, vol. 1, 86.
60Ibid.
61Ibid.
62Ibid., 86, 87.
63L13.
64L7.
65Ibid.
66L8.
67L7.
68Ibid.
TWO: IT IS HARD FOR ME TO GIVE UP THE WORLD
1L16, L304, L320, L645, L927, L471, L809, L32, L39, L907, L179.
2L12.
3Eleventh Annual Catalogue of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Mass., 1847–8. Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections; Fidelia Fiske, Mary Lyon, Recollections of a Noble Woman (London: Morgan, Chase and Scott, n.d.), 42.
4L12.
5Recorded Items, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 1840s, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections; http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/mhc/rg02/4statutes/box02_ff01/behavioral/01.htm
6L13.
7L14.
8L18; Catalogue of the Officers and Students at Amherst College for the Academical Year 1846–47. Amherst College Archives and Special Collections; Fiske, 23; Mount Holyoke College Journal Letter September 1847–June 2, 1848, 2; Eleventh Annual Catalogue of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary; L11, 18; L8; L13.
9Mary Dickinson to Edward Dickinson, December 22, 1822, Edward Dickinson Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
10Eleventh Annual Catalogue of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary; Martha Ackmann, The Matrilineage of Emily Dickinson, PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1988, 35.
11Edward Hammond Clarke, Sex in Education, Or, a Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1874), 51.
12E. A. Andrews, “The Religious Magazine and Family Miscellany,” 1 (1837).
13James E. Hartley, ed., Mary Lyon: Documents and Writings (South Hadley, MA: Doorlight Publications, 2008), 317.
14Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 115; William H. Gibbs, Address Delivered Before the Literary Association of Blandford, Mass (G. W. Wilson, printer. Springfield, MA, 1850), 34; Celia S. Wright Strong files, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.
15L17.
16Edward Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence Illustrated in the Life and Labors of Mary Lyon (New York: Published by the American Tract Society, 1858), 4.
17Susan Danley, “Mount Holyoke: The Grandest Cultivated View in the World.” in Changing Prospects: The View from Mount Holyoke, ed. Marianne Dozema (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 13–19.
18Edward Hitchcock, Reminiscences of Amherst College: Historical, Scientific, Biographical, and Autobiographical with Other and Wider Life Experiences (Northampton, Mass: Bridgman & Childs, 1863), 159.
19Leyda, vol. 1, 150; Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 15; Lucretia Dickinson to Edward Dickinson, March 26, 1823, Edward Dickinson Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
20Ackmann, 56; Mount Holyoke College Journal Letter September 1847–June 2, 1848, 5; Leslie Fields, email to the author, December 3, 2015, referencing Sarah Packard’s 1846 journal; Elizabeth Alden Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1979), 86.
21L15.
22L5.
23Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 54.
24L22.
25Mary Lyon Collection, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections; Eleventh Annual Catalogue of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.
26Vivian Pollak, ed., A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 33.
27L18.
28Malvia Stanton Lang to Louisa Cowles, January 5, 1904, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections; Louisa Dickinson to John Morton Graves, May 1, 1857, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.
29Fiske, 32, 42.
30L16.
31Elizabeth Hall to her friends, September 20, 1848, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.
32Elizabeth Haven to her brother, October 28, 1839, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.
33L10; L5.
34Ibid.
35Fidelia Fiske Papers, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections; Fidelia Fiske to Abigail Moore, August 19, 1843, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.
36L22.
37L23.
38Prayer Meeting Notes, Mary Lyon Collection, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections; Writing of Mary Lyon Respecting Property, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections; Amanda Porterfield, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 14; Sarah D. Stowe, History of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary During Its First Half Century, 1837–1887 (Springfield, Mass: Springfield Publishing Company, 1887), 78.
39Habegger, 14.
40L9.
41Mount Holyoke College Journal Letter September 1847–June 2, 1848, 18–20.
42Leyda, vol. 1, 135–36.
43Ibid., 135.
44Prayer Meeting Notes, Mary Lyon Collection, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.
45L20.
46L10.
47Ibid.
48Mount Holyoke College Journal Letter, September 1847–June 2, 1848; Mary Lyon Collection, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.
49Mary Lyon Collection. Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.
50Ibid.
51L10.
52L23.
53L35, L750.
54Mount Holyoke College Journal Letter, September 1847–June 2, 1848, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.
55Ibid.
THREE: I’VE BEEN IN THE HABIT MYSELF OF WRITING SOME FEW THINGS
1L76; Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 252.
2L23.
3L86.
4L82.
5Leyda, vol. 1, 211–12.
6Ibid., 245.
7Andover Theological Seminary Necrology, 1898–99 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1899), 354–55.
8L95.
9L71.
10Leyda, vol. 1, 193.
11Ibid., 183.
12Ibid., 222.
13Ibid., 225.
14Ibid., 193.
15L53.
16Leyda, vol. 1, 216.
17Cynthia Harbeson, email to the author, Jones Library, Amherst, Massachusetts, June 23, 2016.
18Esther Howland files, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.
19L27.
20L34.
21Leyda, vol. 1, 167–68; The Indicator, February 1850, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.
22L280.
23L63.
24L31.
25L30; Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 223.
26L31.
27L29.
28L31.
29Leyda, vol. 1, 243; Kate Phillips. Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 74; L60.
30L62.
31L29.
32L86.
33Leyda, vol. 1, 203.
34Ibid., 203.
35L53.
36L45.
37Edward Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence Illustrated in the Life and Labors of Mary Lyon (New York: American Tract Society), 4.
38Elizabeth Alden Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates. Hanover, NH, University Press of New England, 1979), 313.
39Recollections of Mary Lyon with Selections from Her Instructions to the Pupils of Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary. (Boston, American Tract Society, 1866), v.
40Ibid., 24.
41L59.
42L30.
43L36.
44L79.
45L54.
46L30.
47Ibid.
48L43.
49L85; L36; Habegger, 243; L66.
50Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 405.
51Phillips, 69.
52L31.
53L36; L85.
54L57.
55Phillips, 65.
56Ibid., 72–73.
57Ibid., 75.
58Ebenezer Snell, The Metereological Journal Kept at Amherst College, February 1852.
59L936.
60Leyda, vol. 1, 248.
61Ibid., 249.
62L45, L58.
63L73.
64The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition, 53–55.
65Acts 2:19.
66L35.
67L36.
68Cynthia Harbeson, email to the author, Jones Library, Amherst, Massachusetts, June 10, 2016.
69Springfield Daily Republican, February 20, 1852.
70Ibid.
71L77.
72Millicent Todd Bingham, Emily Dickinson’s Home: The Early Years as Revealed in Family Correspondence and Reminiscences (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), 268.
73L79.
74L46.
75Leyda, vol. 1, 246.
76Ibid., 251.
77L110.
FOUR: DECIDED TO BE DISTINGUISHED
1L199.
2The New York Times, January 5, 1859.
3Hampshire and Franklin Express, January 7, 1859.
4Hampshire and Franklin Express, December 31, 1858.
5L176.
6L212.
7Ibid.
8L77.
9L85.
10L182.
11Ibid.
12Ibid.
13Ibid.
14Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 294.
15Ibid., 266.
16Ibid., 291.
17L131.
18L108.
19Leyda, vol. 1, 332.
20L102.
21L96.
22L94.
23L118.
24Leyda, vol. 1, 302.
25L88.
26L159.
27L144.
28L88.
29Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Recollections of a Country Girl 18—to 1900. Unpublished manuscript (1935), Brown University Library, Special Collections Department, Manuscript Division, 145–46.
30L199.
31Ibid.
32Ibid.
33L731.
34Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 309.
35L185.
36L133.
37Ibid.
38Biographical Encyclopedia of Massachusetts (Boston: Metropolitan Publishing and Engraving Company, 1883), 185.
39L159.
40Leyda, vol. 1, 302.
41L78.
42L176.
43L85.
44L166; L79.
45L93.
46L154.
47L176.
48Judith Farr “Emily Dickinson and Marriage: The ‘Etruscan Experiment,” in Reading Emily Dickinson’s Letters: Critical Essays, eds. Jane Donahue Eberwein and Cindy MacKenzie (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 186.
49L199.
50Leyda, vol. 1, 253.
51Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 85.
52L178.
53Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Part 6, MS 0353, Colorado College, Tutt Library, Special Collections & Archives.
54Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 451–52, 460.
55Habegger, 298.
56Coleman Hutchison, “Eastern Exiles: Dickinson, Whiggery, and War,” Emily Dickinson Journal 13, no. 2, 2.
57L97.
58Habegger, 328.
59L94.
60L182.
61L155.
62F6.
63F33.
64L195.
65L114.
66The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, R. W. Franklin, ed. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1981), 28.
67F23.
68L146.
69L187.
70F21; F24; F26.
71L199.
FIVE: TALLER FEET
1Hampshire Franklin Express, November 22, 186; William A. Stearns, Adjutant Stearns (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1862), not paginated; Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 26, 31.
2L245.
3L234.
4L217.
5Hampshire Franklin Express, November 9, 1860; Leyda, vol. 2, 26.
6L298.
7Wayne E. Phaneuf and Joseph Carvalho III, Not So Civil War: Western Massachusetts at Home and in Battle, vol. 1 (Springfield, MA: The Republican Heritage Series, 2015), 13, 11, 45; Hampshire and Franklin Express, March 7, 1862.
8Hampshire and Franklin Express, September 27, 1861.
9L269.
10Susan Dickinson to Dwight Gilbert, January 10, 1853, Houghton Library, Dickinson Collection.
11Henry Root to Helen Hunt, Wednesday p.m., Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Colorado College, Tutt Library, Special Collections and Archives.
12Helen Hunt to Henry Root, February 26, 1855, Colorado College, Tutt Library, Special Collections and Archives.
13Leyda, vol. 1, 268.
14Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 304.
15L93.
16L167; Leyda, vol. 1, 309, 311, 314; Habegger, 304–5.
17L173.
18F4.
19Leyda, vol. 2, 38.
20F24, F38, F44, F32, F48, F115, F110, F112, F181, F135.
21L238a.
22F945.
23L233.
24L248.
25Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Selected Writings of Emerson (New York: Random House, 1950), 319–41.
26Jack Capps, Emily Dickinson’s Reading: 1836–1886 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 116.
27Leyda, vol. 1, 350–51.
28Susan H. Dickinson, “Magnetic Visitors,” in Amherst (Alumni Quarterly) 33:4 (Spring 1981), 8–15, 27. (“Magnetic Visitors” is a slightly condensed reprint of Susan’s essay “Annual of the Evergreens” archived in the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
29F45.
30F1263.
31For the intricacies regarding the multiple drafts of this poem, I have used Ralph W. Franklin, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). All subsequent reference to this poem derive from this transcription of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” F124.
32L277.
33George Merriam, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles, vol. 1 (New York: The Century Co., 1883), 34.
34Dickinson, “Magnetic Visitors,” 13.
35Habegger, 451. Bowles’s tendency to turn a thoughtful moment into humor also may have stemmed from insecurity about his education. While a man of wide-ranging intelligence, Bowles knew he had a poor education. He often found himself the only man in the room who had never gone to college, and the realization undermined him. Stephen G. Weisner, “Embattled Editor: The Life of Samuel Bowles,” PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1986, 9.
36Leyda, vol. 2, 28, 47; L241.
37Leyda, vol. 2, 41.
38Leyda, vol. 1, 368.
39Weisner, “Embattled Editor,” 66.
40Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 489–90.
41F11; Karen Dandurand, “Another Dickinson Poem Published in her Lifetime,” American Literature, 54 (October 1982) 434–37.
42The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, 1.
43Ibid., F124, 161.
44Ibid.
45Ibid.
46Ibid., F124, 162.
47Hampshire Franklin Express, March 7, 1862.
48Hampshire Franklin Express. February 21, 1862.
49Ibid.
50Leyda, vol. 2, 48.
51The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, F124, 161.
52The Amherst regiment named itself “The Amherst Boys.” Hampshire Franklin Express, September 9, 1861; William A. Stearns, Adjutant Stearns (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1862), not paginated.
53Stearns. Adjutant Stearns.
54Ibid.
55Ibid.
56L298. Habegger notes that Thomas Johnson misdated this letter as “1864?” Jay Leyda correctly moved it to December 1862. Habegger, 400.
SIX: ARE YOU TOO DEEPLY OCCUPIED TO SAY IF MY VERSE IS ALIVE?
1Edward W. Chapin, “On College Hill,” Amherst Graduates Quarterly; Student Life at Amherst College, 102–3; Hampshire and Franklin Express, July 11, 1862.
2William A. Stearns, Adjutant Stearns (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1862), not paginated; Charles Folsom Walcott, History of the Twenty-First Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co, 1882), 64–68.
3Polly Longsworth, “Brave Among the Bravest: Amherst in the Civil War,” Amherst (Summer 1999), 25–31; Walcott, History of the Twenty-First, 64–68; William Eleazar Barton, The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the Red Cross, vol. 1. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1922), 190.
4Stearns, Adjutant Stearns.
5L246.
6F384.
7Edward Crowell, Record of the Services of Graduates and Non-Graduates of Amherst College in the Union Army or Navy During the War of the Rebellion (Amherst College 1905); Margaret Dakin, “‘Your Classmate and Friend,’” The Consecrated Eminence, March 4, 2013, https://consecratedeminence.wordpress.comAASC; Longsworth, “Brave Among the Bravest,” 25–31.
8L252.
9L256.
10George S. Merriam, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles, vol. 1 (New York: The Century Co., 1885), 404.
11Bowles was known for occasionally working forty-two continuous hours. Stephen G. Weisner, “Embattled Editor: The Life of Samuel Bowles,” PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1986, 54.
12Merriam, vol. 1, 315.
13Ibid., 305, 303.
14Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 49, 71.
15Merriam, vol. 1, 308.
16Andrew Elmer Ford, The Story of the Fifteenth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War, 1861–1864 (Clinton Press of W. J. Coulter Courant Office, 1898), 382; Hampshire Franklin Express, September 27, 1861.
17L261.
18F242.
19F260.
20F225.
21L269.
22L261.
23L342b.
24Leyda, vol. 2, 7–8. While Jay Leyda places the date of Wadsworth’s visit in early 1860, other scholars suggest it may have occurred later in the poet’s life.
25L248a.
26F347.
27Leyda, vol. 2, 50.
28Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1862.
29Newton Manross to William Clark, April 20, 1862, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.
30Hampshire Franklin Express, April 18, 1862.
31Newton Manross to William S. Clark April 20, 1862, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections; Patrick Browne, “Two Friends at Antietam,” June 8, 2011, historicaldigressions.com; Springfield Republican, April 15, 1862; Hampshire Franklin Express, April 18, 1862.
32Higginson, “Letter to a Young Contributor.”
33F207.
34F269.
35F312.
36F314.
37F320.
38F372.
39F409.
40F479.
41F236.
42F282, F204, F304.
43Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1891; Higginson, “Letter to a Young Contributor.”
44L238.
45L260.
46Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters.”
47Wendy Martin, An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Adrienne Rich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 108.
48The History of the Town of Amherst, Massachusetts, Compiled and Published by Carpenter and Morehouse (Amherst: Press of Carpenter & Morehouse, 1896) 492; Dan Lombardo, email to the author, November 22, 2016.
49L262.
SEVEN: BULLETINS ALL DAY FROM IMMORTALITY
1All quotations from this paragraph are L261.
2L265, L261.
3L261.
4Ibid.
5Ibid.
6L290.
7L261.
8Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” in the Atlantic Monthly, October 1891, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1891/10/emily-dickinsons-letters/306524/.
9L352.
10L788.
11L268.
12L265.
13L271.
14L268.
15L265; L271.
16L271.
17L274.
18Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Complete Civil War Journals and Selected Letters, ed. Christopher Looby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 229.
19L280.
20Ibid.
21Higginson, Complete Civil War Journals, 310.
22L274.
23James R. Guthrie’s study of Dickinson’s vision is indispensible for understanding the problems with her eyes and how reduced sight affected her poetry. James R. Guthrie, Emily Dickinson’s Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998), 9, 10, 13, 18, 20, 21, 30, 178, 180; L439
24L285.
25Ibid.
26Ibid.
27L286.
28Karen Dandurand, “Dickinson and the Public,” in Dickinson and Audience, Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 269.
29Mike Kelly, “Emily Dickinson and the New York Press,” Consecrated Eminence, July 15, 2013. Amherst College Archives and Special Collections. Consecratedeminence.wordpress.com.
30Dandurand, “Dickinson and the Public,” 255–77; Karen Dandurand, “New Dickinson Civil War Publications,” American Literature 56, no. 1 (March 1984), 17–27; American Newspaper Directory, ed. George Presbury Rowell (New York: Printers’ Ink Pub. Co., 1870), 669; In addition, I am indebted to Karen Dandurand for countless conversations about Dickinson’s publication history.
31James R. Guthrie and I share the belief that Dickinson was worried her poor eyesight would bring an end to her poems. Guthrie, Emily Dickinson’s Vision, 22, 24, 30.
32L268.
33Wayne E. Phaneuf and Joseph Carvalho III, A Not So Civil War: Western Massachusetts at Home and in Battle, vol. 1 (Springfield, MA: The Republican, 2015), 134–135; Patrick Browne, “Billy Yank and Johnny Reb and Christmas on the Rappahonnock, 1862, Historical Digression, December 22, 2015. historical digression.com; Higginson, Complete Civil War Journals, 216; Walter L. Powell, “’So Clear of Victory’: Emily Dickinson’s Gettysburg Address, Lecture at the Amherst History Museum, November 9, 2013, sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum; Walter L. Powell, email with the author, March 14, 2019.
34Higginson, Complete Civil War Journals, 350.
35Ibid., 305.
36Leyda, vol. 2, 90.
37L290.
38F824.
39L290.
40Boston Public Library, https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:kh04mv993.
41L290.
42Ibid.
43Guthrie, Emily Dickinson’s Vision, 9.
44L292.
45n.a., “Iritis” in Hospital, a Weekly Journal of Science, Medicine, Nursing and Philanthropy (London: London Hospital, vol. 11, Dec. 12, 1891), 131–32.
46n.a., “The Treatment of Iritis” in Hospital, a Weekly Journal of Science, Medicine, Nursing and Philanthropy (London: London Hospital, vol. 42, July 15, 1899), 260; L293.
47Richard B. Sewall, The Lyman Letters: New Light on Emily Dickinson and Her Family (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1965), 76.
48L289.
49L289, L294.
50L291.
51F484.
52Guthrie shares this view of one possible benefit of Dickinson’s illness. Guthrie, Emily Dickinson’s Vision, 13.
53L583.
54F681.
55L293.
56L289, L295.
57L289.
58L293, L294.
59L295.
60L294, L306.
61L296.
62Ibid.
63L302.
64L296.
65Higginson, Complete Civil War Journals, 220.
66Ibid., 7.
67Critic Helen Vendler in describing Dickinson’s “supposed person” wrote, “Although she sometimes did write the sort of first-order poem that reads like a transcription of a life-event, such as a vigil around a deathbed, more often she found a second order ‘algebraic’ equivalent for emotional occasions, whether rapturous or troubling.” Vendler cites “Before I got my eye put out – ” (F336) as an example of a “symbolic equivalent” that arose from “emotional torture.” Helen Vendler, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 9.
68F336. Guthrie contends Dickinson’s “description of scenes she would look upon, were she to regain full use of her eyes, is so rapturous that we may infer her transgression had been to admire the visible world excessively.” Guthrie, Emily Dickinson’s Vision, 15.
69Cambridge Chronicle, November 12, 1864.
70L297.
71L290.
72Sewall, The Lyman Letters, 69.
73Dickinson’s poems that reference illness, darkness, and blindness are many. A few notable ones from this period are: “The Soul has Bandaged moments – ,” F360; “Renunciation – is a piercing Virtue – ,” F782; “They say that ‘Time assuages’ – ,” F861; “Some say good night – at night – ,” F586; “My first well Day – since many ill – ,” F288; and “What I see not, I better see – ,” F869.
74L280.
EIGHT: YOU WERE NOT AWARE THAT YOU SAVED MY LIFE
1Richard B. Sewall, The Lyman Letters: New Light on Emily Dickinson and Her Family (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1965) 76.
2L304; Paraic Finnerty, Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 43.
3L308.
4Frank Prentice Rand, The Village of Amherst: A Landmark of Light (Amherst: The Historical Society, 1958), 123.
5Cambridge Chronicle, April 8, 22, and 29, 1865.
6L306.
7L311.
8L316.
9Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 120.
10L319.
11Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 162.
12Ibid., 197.
13Ibid., 97.
14L316.
15L316; Leyda, vol. 2, 110, 112.
16Leyda, vol. 2, 110, 111.
17Ibid., 132.
18L330a.
19L330.
20Wineapple, 163.
21Leyda, vol. 2, 110.
22Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 93.
23Ibid., 139.
24Ibid., 95.
25Leyda, vol. 2, 130.
26Phillips, 125.
27Ibid., 101.
28Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 566.
29Leyda, vol. 2, 102.
30Aife Murray makes a compelling case for Margaret Maher providing more time for Dickinson to write. Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010).
31Millicent Todd Bingham, Emily Dickinson’s Home: The Early Years as Revealed in Family Correspondence and Reminiscences (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1967), 414.
32Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 321.
33L318.
34Wineapple, 21.
35L330a.
36Ibid.
37L342.
38Wineapple, 170.
39Ibid., 176.
40Rand, 172.
41Amherst Record, August 24, 1870.
42Amherst Record, August 10, 1870.
43Amherst Record, August 17, 1870.
44L342a.
45Leyda, vol. 2, 112.
46L342a.
47L477.
48L342a. All subsequent quotations of Higginson’s visit with Dickinson are found in L342a and L342b.
49Leyda, vol. 2, 154.
50L342a.
51Leyda, Volume. 2, p. 151.
52Amherst Record, August 8, 1870.
53F1175.
54L352.
55Finnerty, 130.
56L622.
57L352.
58L553.
59L342b.
60Ibid.
61F721.
62Growing seasons with wet springs and dry summers produce especially sweet apples. Conversation with Tom Clark, Clarkdale Orchards, September 4, 2017.
63L343.
64Wineapple, 21.
65Amherst Record, August 24, 1870.
66Rand, 114.
NINE: SUCCESS IS COUNTED SWEETEST
1Helen Hunt to Mrs. E. C. Banfield, August 16, 1873, Helen Hunt Jackson Collection, Tutt Library Special Collections and Archives, Colorado College; Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 204.
2Helen Hunt to Mrs. E. C. Banfield, August 16, 1873.
3Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson: Face to Face (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932), 17.
4MacGregor Jenkins, “A Child’s Recollections of Emily Dickinson,” Christian Union, October 24, 1891, B215–217; Leyda, vol. 2, 240.
5Mary Alden Allen, Around a Village Green: Sketches of Life in Amherst (Northampton: Kraushar Press, 1939), 31.
6Bianchi, 63.
7F409.
8L405a.
9L381.
10L380.
11L368.
12Leyda, vol. 2, 193.
13Ibid.
14Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 168.
15Ibid., 169.
16Leyda, vol. 2, 218.
17Phillips, 172.
18L360.
19Millicent Todd Bingham, Emily Dickinson’s Home: The Early Years as Revealed in Family Correspondence and Reminiscences (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), 444.
20Ibid., 460–64.
21L360.
22Leyda, vol. 2, 71.
23Ibid., 223.
24Daily Bulletin of Weather Reports, Signal Service, US Army, June 16, 1874, 4:34 p.m. (War Department. Washington, DC, 1877), 92–94.
25Leyda, vol. 2, 224.
26Ibid.; L414; Mary Todd Kaercher, email to the author, October 13, 2017.
27Leyda, vol. 2, 224.
28Leyda, vol. 2, 225.
29L414.
30Leyda, vol. 2, 225–226; Amherst Record, June 24, 1874; Bingham, 473; Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 562; L432, note 538.
31Bingham, 411.
32L432.
33Richard B. Sewall, The Lyman Letters: New Light on Emily Dickinson and Her Family (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1965), 70–71.
34Ibid.
35L418.
36L413.
37L418; L470.
38L450.
39Leyda, vol. 2, 244–45.
40Ibid., 237.
41L432.
42L449.
43L460.
44Bianchi, 14.
45L513.
46Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Recollections of a Country Girl, unpublished manuscript (1935), Brown University Library Special Collections Department, Manuscript Division, 120.
47Habegger, 559–60; Bianchi, Emily Dickinson, 124.
48Leyda, vol. 2, 229.
49Bianchi, Emily Dickinson, 129–30.
50Sewall, Lyman Letters, 34.
51Leyda, vol. 2, 231.
52Bianchi, Emily Dickinson, 104.
53Ibid., 39.
54Martha Dickinson Bianchi, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924), 13.
55Sewall, Lyman Letters, 70.
56Bianchi, Emily Dickinson, 15; Betsy Johnson, email to the author, October 25, 2017.
57L441.
58Letters, 549.
59Leyda, vol. 2, 184; L475; L491.
60Bianchi, Emily Dickinson, 14.
61Leyda, vol. 2, 177.
62Bianchi, Emily Dickinson, 125.
63Bryant E. Tolles Jr., Summer by the Seaside: The Architecture of New England Coastal Resort Hotels, 1820–1950 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2008), 91; Bianchi. Recollections of a Country Girl, 48.
64L428.
65Bianchi, Life and Letters, 13.
66L444.
67L444 notes.
68L444a.
69Ibid.
70Ibid.
71L477.
72L474.
73Amherst Record, September 20, 1876.
74Catherine E. Kelly, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 130.
75Ebenezer Snell and Sabra Snell, The Meteorological Journal kept at Amherst College, Amherst College and Special Collections; Marta Werner, email to the author, October 23, 2017.
76Phillips, 155.
77Prospect House file, Jones Library Special Collections, Amherst, Massachusetts; Daily Hampshire Gazette, November 19, 1975; Burt’s Illustrated Guide of the Connecticut Valley, 1866.
78Quincy (Illinois) Daily Whig, September 11, 1876.
79Madeleine B. Stern and Daniel Shealy, “No Name Series,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1991), 376.
80Ibid., 385, 386.
81L476a.
82Bianchi, Emily Dickinson, 35.
83Amherst Record, October 11, 1876; Bianchi, Emily Dickinson, 36.
84L476c.
85Ibid.
86L476.
87Phillips, 140–41.
88Leyda, vol. 2, 236.
89L476c.
90F930.
91F1267.
92F1345.
93L476c.
94L476; L486.
95L476b.
96Helen Hunt Jackson Diary, October 13, 1876, Helen Hunt Jackson Collection, Tutt Library Special Collections and Archives, Colorado College.
97Leyda, vol. 2, 260.
98Ibid., 261.
99L476c
100L573b.
101L477.
102Stern and Shealy, 389.
103F112; The version of the poem included here is the way it appeared in A Masque of Poets. In seeking to standardize the poem, Niles eliminated dashes, altered a line break, and switched capital letters to lowercase, among other edits. A Masque of Poets, including Guy Vernon, a Novelette in Verse (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878), 174.
104Leyda, vol. 2, 260.
105L573c.
106Stern and Shealy, 390.
TEN: CALLED BACK
1L665.
2L735.
3L522.
4Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 448.
5F428.
6Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds (New York: Viking, 2010), 135.
7Habegger, 608.
8Leyda, vol. 2, 320.
9Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson: Face to Face (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932), 66–67.
10L549, L493.
11L542.
12Habegger, 572.
13L830, L489.
14L536.
15L738.
16L733.
17L1040.
18Ibid.
19L773; L1039.
20L765.
21L827.
22L785.
23L792.
24L779.
25Leyda, vol. 2, 384.
26L785.
27L521.
28L788.
29Martha Dickinson Bianchi, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924), 70.
30L790.
31L559.
32L562.
33Ibid.
34L790.
35L780.
36L752.
37L790.
38L750.
39F1691.
40Leyda, vol. 2, 353.
41Ibid., 354.
42Ibid., 357.
43Ibid., 361.
44Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 245.
45Leyda, vol. 2, 377.
46Ibid., 405.
47Ibid., 433, 445.
48Ibid., 438.
49L858.
50Leyda, vol. 2, 336.
51L749.
52F1489.
53L814.
54F895.
55L813.
56L813b.
57L601a.
58F1488.
59Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 228.
60Ibid., 229.
61Ibid., 234.
62Ibid., 252.
63Habegger, 618.
64Ibid., 612.
65Leyda, vol. 2, 406.
66L873.
67Leyda, vol. 2, 411.
68Ibid.
69L873.
70L868.
71L874.
72L890.
73L967.
74L968.
75L967.
76L907.
77Leyda, vol.2, 425.
78L939.
79L937a.
80Ibid.
81Phillips, 253.
82Valerie Sherer Mathes, The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 216.
83L976a.
84Ibid.
85Phillips, 272.
86Ibid., 233.
87L1015.
88L1043.
89Leyda, vol. 2, 466.
90L1034.
91L267.
92F1389; F1453; F1440; F1152; F1512.
93L619.
94Amherst Record, May 12, 1886.
95Amherst Record, May 19, 1886.
96Leyda, vol. 2, 470.
97L1046.
98Leyda, vol. 2, 471.
99Bianchi, Emily Dickinson, 158–59; Conversation with Alfred Venne, Planetarium Educator, Bassett Planetarium, Amherst College, September 15, 2017, and Alfred Venne, email to the author, September 18, 2017.
100L332.
101F372.
102Emily Dickinson’s Death and Funeral File, Jones Library Special Collections, Amherst, Massachusetts.
103L1024.
104L1030; Letters, 896.
105Bianchi, Emily Dickinson, 61.
106Leyda, vol. 2, 472–73.
107Leyda, vol. 2, 474–75.
108Paul Crumbley, “Emily Dickinson’s Funeral and the Paradox of Literary Fame,” The Emily Dickinson Journal 26, no. 2 (2017), 55.
109L342a.
110L342b.
111F466.
112A week after Dickinson’s death, Vinnie discovered her sister’s poems. While she was well aware that Emily wrote poetry, she had no idea how much. Vinnie first approached Sue with editing the work, but Sue took more time to consider the project than Vinnie wanted. She next asked Mabel Loomis Todd if she would do the work. Mabel transcribed hundreds of poems, while the Dickinson family contacted Higginson. Roberts Brothers published Poems by Emily Dickinson, coedited by Todd and Higginson, in 1890 in time for Christmas sales. The book sold out and immediately went into multiple printings. For further information on the disposition of the poems, see R. W. Franklin, “Introduction,” in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 1–43.
113May 19, 1886, Snell Family Meteorological Journal, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.