So long as Austin Dickinson lived he continued to control Vinnie — up to a point. In 1894, when she refused to hand his mistress half the copyright in Emily Dickinson’s letters, Austin let fly. Following that first stand Lavinia hesitated not at all in refusing Austin’s next diktat, that she will her rights, away from the family, to Mabel Todd. From the start, Lavinia had found herself tugged into the lovers’ camp, to the detriment of her bonds with Austin’s wife and children. What could she have done? Lavinia’s friend Miss Buffam, a schoolmistress accustomed to independence, noticed that not a cent in Lavinia’s pocket was not meted out by her brother. As brother and co-heir of the Homestead, Austin could come and go as he pleased and his ‘friend’ (Mabel) came too, and the truth of their tie Austin did not offer to explain.
So it was that the affair was known — and not known. There was no evidence, not in legal terms. As a lawyer, Austin Dickinson was adept when it came to evidence. Love letters were locked in a safe-box in the vault of the bank, and the letters themselves took care to omit clues and names.
For a long time Lavinia had been more compliant than Emily. Where Emily had retained her closeness to Sue and Ned, Lavinia was positioned with her brother, and the more that position strained her ties with The Evergreens, the more dependent on Austin she became; and then, after Emily died, the purpose of her life was the joint venture with Mabel Todd. Their faith in the greatness of Emily Dickinson ensured a bond with Mabel, reinforced by kisses and David Todd’s particular affection. He came to fix her clock and once, in 1894, when she’d been ill, he gave her ‘a lovely warm bath while her bed was changed’. It was a practical, hands-on act of kindness by a man at ease with women’s bodies. Vinnie was not so conventional as to resist this attention. Mabel mentions it matter-of-factly. She was often at the Homestead to discuss the poems and Lavinia made return visits to The Dell, bringing bushels of Dickinson manuscripts in her basket. It was therefore no small matter for Lavinia, aged sixty-one, to take her stand in August and September 1894.
Lavinia was a fame-seeking fool, Austin exploded to Emily’s publisher, Mr Hardy.
But Austin’s heart condition and failing health changed the balance of power. For Mabel it meant an end to kingly protection. Lavinia, freed from her brother’s rule, burst into action. This sister who had been in the background, tending others, advanced with unexpected aplomb towards the footlights of a public confrontation. From now on Lavinia Dickinson was centre stage.
As Austin lay dying in the summer of 1895 he sent a message of gratitude to David Todd. For twelve years Austin had believed in the primacy of his tie with Mabel, and Mabel’s letters had endorsed this belief. Only once did Susan shake it. She pointed out that while Austin had rejected all physical and emotional attachment to his marriage, Mabel had not done so with hers. What Austin had taken to be no more than the dutifulness of wifely devotion continued to be, for David, an active tie. So Susan argued: Mabel claimed two men and ‘had the best’ of both their lives. In reporting this to Mabel, Austin owned to the awkwardness he was made to feel. He had no adequate answer. Nor did Mabel offer one.
During Austin’s last weeks, confined to bed at The Evergreens where Mabel had no access, Lavinia still acted on the lovers’ behalf, trying to carry letters from Mabel undetected by the rest of the family. Austin died on 16 August, when the Todds were away in New Salem, near Shutesbury, where David delivered a speech on the Dickinson dynasty.
In contrast to the relief at The Evergreens — an end to the daily pain inflicted by a father and husband who’d withdrawn his love — the Todds were shattered. ‘My best friend died tonight, & I seem stranded,’ David cried out in his diary, ‘he touched and forwarded everything.’ The funeral, on 19 August, struck him as the saddest day of his life. Millicent, aged fifteen, never forgot her mother’s inconsolable weeping and pleas for her husband to fetch the love letters from the vault. Secrecy now compelled her less than what she needed: to make Austin’s love known. Austin was never persuaded to make her ‘Mabel Loomis Dickinson’ — in effect, to go public. Once he’d gone, she was prepared to defy opinion in a new role as Austin’s widow, an open rival of Susan Dickinson, back in her blacks.
So here is Mabel in a black dress, black cape and black hat. With a black mourning veil over her face and her lover’s ring on a pointed finger when she draws off her gloves, Mabel goes about as Austin’s rightful mate. Lavinia remonstrates in vain: ‘It’s degrading to Austin.’
‘Austin wished it,’ Mabel says. ‘It was a promise between us.’
To flaunt her ‘widowing’ is, of course, provocative: insulting to Susan, embarrassing to her own husband and altogether indiscreet. Is this the woman who’d left Amherst in the winter of 1889–90 to avoid the whispers? Her public conduct in the late summer of 1895 reveals her as less than calculating: it’s natural to her to extend a genuine loss and grief in turns and costumes. Mabel’s all too manifest widowhood recalls her haggard appearance at Dickinson’s graveside in May 1886. The theatricality to which she rose on occasion is not to say it was all an act.
Before Austin’s funeral an acute and genuine anguish had thrust her into a dramatic scene. Defying the prohibition against her entering The Evergreens, she slipped inside while the family dined (in a room to the left) and dashed through the red hall, turning right, into what the family called ‘the dying room’, the dark old marital bedroom where the body lay. Here is her diary entry for Monday, 19 August 1895: ‘My Austin is going to Wildwood [cemetery] — that is, his dear, dear body is. I kissed it a long, tender goodbye. He is here with me.’ Intimacy with the dead deepens eleven days later when she says, ‘I feel my eyes closing to Earth, and opening — to Austin!’ Then a cry of separation breaks from her on 4 September: ‘I want Austin — I agonize for him — I call for him, I reach to him.’
Grief accompanied her on a second journey to Japan the following year. En route Austin seemed as near ‘on a volcano in Hawaii as in our own meadow in Amherst’. No other soul would ever meet her ‘real, innermost self’ as this man had with his ‘exquisite sympathy’.
‘If only I could die this night!’ she whispered to herself.
On the return crossing, more than a year after Austin died, she parted her hair and saw a few white threads under the brown, and peering closer into the small cabin mirror detected a line ‘of pain’ on her forehead. She would like to die, she thought again, ‘but as long as I do live I must stay young. Youth is my role.’
Back in Amherst she plunged into thirty-five public talks over the following winter of 1896–7. Marking even now the stabs of pain, she saw them as ‘signet royal of my closeness to my dear master’.
For all that Mabel suffered at the loss of a man who had loved her exclusively and with all his being for twelve years, it can’t provide a reliable answer as to whether her prime attachment was to lover or husband. The abundance and fervour of her love letters to Austin declare to him (and to the readers she hoped one day to have*) that he was the love of her life. There are two reasons to question this.
One is that Mabel adapted her voice to her role. Austin’s rampant emotion required arias of unconditional love tuned to the highest pitch of soulfulness. The operatic vehemence Mabel delivered day after day would not be realistic in domestic life. It’s sustainable because the lovers could not cohabit, and sustained too by the vibrato of fantasy that separation invites. As recently as 1893, there had been Austin’s renewed fantasy of escape out west when he welcomed an offer of a post in Omaha, Nebraska. At the age of sixty-four he’d been prepared to start a new life with Mabel. Then there was the lovers’ fantasy of building a house on a hilltop near Amherst; and Mabel’s failed fantasy of Susan’s death. ‘A deaf God’, Mabel cried at the close of a letter to Austin near the end of his life.
A more serious reason to question Austin’s pre-eminence with Mabel is her continued devotion to her husband. Though this did serve as a cover for her affair, it was more than that. At the outset, Mabel chose David as a husband who would back her sense of destiny. Their commitment to promote each other’s work was as much a pact as a marriage. David’s adventures in romance and conquest were diverting, but stable attachment was reserved for his wife.
‘And if my life is the success I hope it may yet be, I shall not rest until my ambition is gratified by seeing you in the highest degree honoured & appreciated for your full worth,’ he assured Mabel.
Success. Honour. Worth. The language of aspiration is unremarkable; it’s the reciprocity that’s rare. In the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century many a woman had to choose between marriage and career. Not Mabel. On his return journey from Angola in 1890, David mailed a letter from Barbados reaffirming a marriage of mounting ambition on both sides. ‘My advancements and the little successes of my life so far have all come of you. Eleven years more will, I venture, see us more thoroughly in love than now.’
David had reason to welcome his wife’s liaison. To win the ear of the college treasurer was Mabel’s effort for David’s advance. As a young astronomer he had been lured back to Amherst by a mirage: a new observatory of his own. This had not materialised. Then, in the early nineties, President Seelye fell ill; there was an interregnum and Austin Dickinson took over. It’s likely that he was behind an initial move to build an up-to-date observatory at the college. By 1894 Mabel was writing letters on stationery with an observatory letterhead, even though the building took another decade to complete. To encourage funding, she collaborated with David on a book, Total Eclipses of the Sun (1894), published under her name by Roberts Brothers in the same year as they published her selection of Dickinson’s Letters.
To consider Mabel’s allegiance to one man or the other may be the wrong question. She never compares husband and lover in the way of Hester Prynne or Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. Here is an unclassifiable phenomenon: not quite the femme fatale, not quite the gold-digger, and not so much the social climber as to leave her husband in order to cling exclusively to her ‘King’. The constant in her history, far back, is that ‘presentiment’ combined with contempt for the domestic destiny of lesser women. Mabel’s ambition, confirmed by an array of talents but starved of means, came nearest the bone. Money therefore meant a lot to her.
Alerted to this, Austin had wished Mabel to inherit the Dickinson meadow. In the 1890s it was open land where corn grew — apart from the Todds’ plot which, as Vinnie stressed later, had been ‘cut out’ of what was now her property. Back in November 1887, when he’d made his will, Austin had assured Mabel she would benefit by his death since he’d arranged for Vinnie to hand over this stretch of seven to eight acres.
Austin covered his defection from his family with an impeccable will that left The Evergreens to his wife and the meadow to his sister. On the face of it, he was the responsible husband and brother. But Austin’s plan was otherwise: to do his family down, and to use his sister to carry this out. The promise he extracted from Lavinia required her, in effect, to take over the moral burden for disinheriting his children of this ancestral land. Lavinia’s niece and nephew, Mattie and Ned, were bound to be outraged, and Susan too on their behalf. Inevitably their anger would fall on Lavinia. Emily, it will be remembered, had stood by their nephew, assuring him there would be ‘no treason’. ‘… Ever be sure of me, Lad.’ If Lavinia acted on her brother’s wish she would be at war with these, her closest relations and neighbours — hard on a lonely woman. It’s unlikely Austin troubled himself to see beyond a scheme that shielded himself and Mabel from the scandal of an overt bequest of these proportions. He was, after all, accustomed to use Lavinia to further his affair.
When Austin’s heart was giving out in the early summer of 1895 he had done the Todds a final favour. On his last legs he had staggered over to The Dell in order to verify David’s survey of an adjoining strip of land including a great maple tree, the land Mabel wanted most. Austin had already landscaped and planted this strip as though it were part of the Todds’ plot. His final intention is unknown: could this have been a fall-back if Lavinia would not yield the whole meadow? There was nothing on paper apart from the private promise Austin had given Mabel in November 1887. Lavinia had not signed it, so Mabel depended on Lavinia’s assent to an instruction from her brother eight years earlier.
6 October 1895. Austin has been dead seven weeks. Mabel decides it is time to show Lavinia the letter from Austin: his private addendum to a will for an estate of nearly $34,000. It’s not like Austin’s other letters. He states their names: the letter is headed ‘Mrs Todd’ and signed ‘Wm A. Dickinson’ with an air of legal formality. Written in pencil, though, and unwitnessed, it has no legal validity. It’s designed to weigh with Lavinia alone. After the funeral a moved Lavinia had seemed to agree to this bequest, yet the weeks pass and nothing more is said.
On this Sunday morning Mabel goes to see Lavinia with the letter and Lavinia refuses to hand over the meadow.
Vinnie is ‘utterly slippery and treacherous’, Mabel fumes in her diary. Austin always said so, always ‘had entire contempt for her’ but ‘he did not think she would fail to do as he stipulated in this’.
Mabel had too much self-command to permit frustration to interfere with plans. If one plan failed she put a variation on the table. The handsome sideboard Lavinia’s mother Emily Norcross, as a bride, had brought from Monson to Amherst had been moved to the dining room at The Evergreens.* Would Vinnie like her friend Mabel to find her a new sideboard?
Vinnie waved the offer away: ‘I guess we won’t have any trade of that kind.’ She was not to be wheedled into accepting help in lieu of land.
All that autumn, Mabel came back to Lavinia with bonding ideas for their future folded in her endearing gaze. The only way to avoid Mabel would be to put up a pre-emptive barrier, as Susan and her children had done, not speaking, not seeing, and this Vinnie in her loneliness was not yet prepared to do. She needed Mabel Todd to edit a third volume of poems, a prospective delight after the recognition the first volumes had excited. How congenial it was to share once more in the selection. By now Higginson had bowed out, which meant that in the autumn of 1895 Vinnie depended on Todd alone.
With this volume nearing completion, Mabel Todd pressed her to do ‘a lovely thing’: to give the Todds the strip of the meadow, two hundred and ninety by fifty-four feet, that Austin and David had measured. It was to be a secret (in the same way as the editing of Dickinson had been a secret, to avoid opposition). One night, after dark so as to avoid detection, Vinnie took her turn at inspecting the site. Then, on about 29 December, Vinnie agreed to yield. Two days later Mabel Todd, hard-working and punctual as ever, delivered her typescript of Poems: Third Series to Dickinson’s publishers.
The Todds were about to depart for Japan for six to seven months. In February 1896 Mabel was busy with the immense preparation needed for David’s expeditions. As the March date for departure drew near, it was time for Lavinia to actually sign over the land. Mabel was taking no chance that, left to herself, Lavinia might back off once more.
There was another obstacle. Lavinia had a business adviser in place of Austin, another rather volatile gentleman, Dwight Hills, for twenty-four years President of the First National Bank of Amherst. Aware of the pressure on Lavinia to hand over land, he had warned her not to sign any paper without his knowledge. Hills spoke as a protector and Lavinia, rumour said, warmed to this attention from a mature bachelor who lived with his mother. In her youth Lavinia had been a demonstrative young woman with long black hair tinged with red. It was still long and luxurious, and sometimes she shook it out and aired it, combing it with her fingers to the tips. She would rather not annoy Mr Hills with the ‘lovely thing’ she would do for Mabel Todd.
Mabel could not afford to wait. She had to forestall the possibility that, at any moment, Lavinia might consult her protector who was certain to intervene. Another danger was Susan Dickinson, who would be angry, very angry, should she hear of a second transfer of land. Lavinia would be subject to family pressure. For these reasons Mabel Todd could not risk leaving for Japan with the deed unsigned.
Anger threatened Lavinia on three sides but at this point her first consideration still had to be the safety of the new volume of unpublished poems. In January and early February 1896, with Mabel’s preface due, it was vital to satisfy her.
Mabel readied the deed of transfer. She had often handled these as Austin’s unofficial assistant. (Trustees of the college would have been surprised to learn how much she knew of their business.) She had kept a spare blank and filled it in. Who might witness Lavinia’s signature? Since the transaction was to remain secret this had to be done privately, not in a lawyer’s office, and with a witness of unquestionable credentials, preferably from out of town. Mabel consulted a prominent lawyer, Everett C. Bumpus of Tremont Street, Boston.* Bumpus, in his early fifties, already had an eye to the animated and elegantly costumed Mrs Todd. They had met during the winter she spent in Boston in 1889–90, and when they’d met again for a meal in September 1895, a month after Austin’s death, Mabel perceived that Bumpus longed to make love. Her journal crosses this out, but it’s plain that Bumpus continued to be charmed. Now, for Mrs Todd’s purpose, he suggested a colleague called Timothy Spaulding who practised law in Northampton and was a Justice of the Peace. Mr Spaulding was a polite gentleman whom Lavinia had not met but whose family was familiar. As a child she’d known his mother, who had lived in Amherst, and his father had been a friend of her father and brother.
Mabel arranged for Mr Spaulding to call on Lavinia on 7 February at 7 p.m., the usual time for social calls. No one who spied Mr Spaulding would suspect he’d come on business at such an hour.
‘I don’t think she’ll sign it,’ Mabel said to the lawyer as they walked over to the Homestead.
‘Oh yes she will.’
When Lavinia opened the door Mabel introduced him.
He spoke to her about the old days, drawing her out by listening to what she had to say. In subsequent and conflicting reports of what transpired during this scene, there is no disagreement over one fact: Mr Spaulding appeared keen to discuss the poetry of Emily Dickinson with her sister. For Lavinia this was the absorbing subject of discussion for twenty to thirty minutes, the normal length of a social call.
Then Mabel asked Lavinia, ‘Might I show Mr Spaulding your mother’s blue china?’
The three went into the dining room. It will be recalled that this was the sitting room in winter and the scene of Mabel’s embraces back in the eighties when Emily was alive. Here Lavinia keeps her writing materials. While the lawyer peers at dinner plates depicting the landing of Lafayette (in support of George Washington during the War of Independence), Mabel sets the deed on the table next to a pen and inkstand, and indicates where Lavinia is to sign.
Mr Spaulding, preoccupied in another part of the room, lifts his head to give Lavinia the routine caution. This is a deed to transfer a strip of land. It must be done of her free will. In Mabel’s statement later, ‘he said to her he should suppose she’d like to give Mrs Todd a little piece of land. He took it as an ordinary thing and didn’t make much of it. She answered as an ordinary lady would as if it was alright and said she’d be glad to sign it.’
It did not occur to Lavinia to see the document in advance. Accustomed to her father’s and brother’s legal expertise and handicapped by poor sight (she didn’t use spectacles), Lavinia was not in the habit of reading documents and she did not read this deed before she put her name to it in her sprawling hand — Mabel likened Lavinia’s hand to a demented spider who has fallen into an inkwell.
Mr Spaulding talked a bit more about Emily Dickinson, and then walked off with Mabel to The Dell. Their exit together in a mood of friendship emboldened Mabel to make her last move: she asked the lawyer to delay registration of the deed. By that time Mabel was at a distance from the scene, on her way to Japan.
One morning in May, in the post office, Lavinia’s loyal servant Maggie Maher heard talk of the deed. Hastening home, she broke it to Lavinia that talk in town gave out a Todd victory.
Lavinia was appalled. Instead of the ‘lovely’ little arrangement she’d been led to expect, and the congenial visit from Mr Spaulding in whose presence she had felt secure, the fierce terms of the deed were designed to wipe out any claim the Dickinson family might put forward to contravene Lavinia’s gesture. Here are the terms to which she’d put her signature:
Lavinia Dickinson of her free will gives Mabel Loomis Todd land, adjacent to land deeded to her by the Dickinsons on June 8th, 1886.
The land is handed over ‘in consideration of the sum of One dollar and other valuable considerations paid by Mabel Loomis Todd’. [What was ‘paid’ remains vague.]
Miss Dickinson grants the land to Mrs Todd and her heirs ‘to their own use and behoof forever’, and Miss Dickinson’s heirs [Ned and Mattie Dickinson] will defend Mrs Todd’s heirs forever against ‘the lawful claims and demands of all persons’.
Now it was public. Now Mr Hills would know the foolish thing she had done behind his back. Lavinia was distraught. She thought he would no longer protect her — an abrupt end to his protection. He would be furious, and more so her sister-in-law, dear nephew and determined niece. As Lavinia now saw, she had put her name to a document that betrayed her family, an act Emily, ten years before, had resisted to the death.
Mr Hills, as angry as Lavinia foresaw, told her there was but one way out: she could contest the deed if she had not understood what she was doing. This meant accusing Mabel Todd of misrepresentation or worse.
There was something Lavinia could not mention to Mr Hills: the fissure in the family, known to two or three editors who’d felt the sharp edge of conflicting interests but otherwise concealed. The Dickinsons had contrived to preserve an unblemished front. After the advent of Mabel they had lived outwardly as before. For thirteen years, ever since 1883, no one had attempted to cross the fissure between Austin and Lavinia on one side and, on the other, Susan, Ned and Mattie. To abandon Mabel and rejoin her family would be to cross that fissure. Looking across to the other side, Lavinia stood for a space alone.
*
Lavinia took this leap. That May she drew up a Bill of Complaint with the help of her lawyers, Hammond & Field. Here she invented a plausible story: she’d merely agreed to allow no building on the meadow adjacent to the Todds’ house. She’d been willing to do so because she would never permit a building where there were ‘sacred’ shrubs (planted by her brother). Then Mrs Todd had come with an argument that Miss Dickinson might die, so it would help to have this agreement in writing. Under repeated pressure Miss Dickinson had agreed to sign a paper. She denied that she had ever agreed to deed the land; she did not recall hearing the word ‘deed’. Mrs Todd had called it a ‘paper’. She also alleged that Mrs Todd had prepared the deed secretly; it was in Mrs Todd’s hand. The value of the land, for which nothing had been paid, was said to be $2000 (though actually worth, at the time, about $600). Miss Dickinson had not herself employed Timothy Spaulding to witness the signature. There had been a deceptively casual air to the business. She had no foreknowledge of the signing and had thought Mr Spaulding was coming, at his request, to discuss her sister’s poems.
Far off in Japan, Mabel Todd worked away at the proofs of Poems: Third Series. She was scrupulous about checking against Dickinson’s original manuscripts and it’s likely that she took these with her to the other side of the world. By August the proofs were back in Boston, Todd ever prompt and professional. On 10 August 1896 Roberts Brothers drew up a contract with no reference to Mrs Todd. This, the fourth contract with the firm, was the simplest: all rights and royalties were lodged with Lavinia Dickinson alone.
That August, Poems: Third Series was announced for the autumn. This was the first volume of poems to be edited solely by Mabel Todd; it was, then, the first to go out minus the protection of Higginson’s name, and now, at last, even before it was published, what Emily Dickinson had feared did happen. A lash from a newspaper was bound to chasten a woman immodest enough to enter the public arena. ‘That singular anomaly, the Lady novelist,’ sang the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado.* ‘I don’t think she’d be missed, I’m sure she’d not be missed.’ The New York Tribune complained of Emily Dickinson in August 1896: why must the public be imposed upon yet again with ‘mere trifles or experiments’ from this ‘minor’ poet?
Ned, on holiday in Maine with his ‘girls’ (as he called his mother and sister), shuddered for Aunt Emily. As the man in the family, Ned was all too aware that he was not manly in the expected way. At thirty-five, a need to act for his family’s protection reproached his long retreat from conflict. Throughout his twenties he’d been sunk, helpless, in a ‘witchesmare’. Roused now to action by this slight to his aunt, Ned cut Lavinia to the heart with an accusation that she had brought shame on her beloved sister. This is what came of encouraging the Todds: ‘these people’, he calls them, as though the very name stuck in his throat. On a foggy morning in Maine, Ned typed the following:
Hotel Claremont,
Southwest Harbor.
27 August 1896
My dear Aunt:
… For the sake of my Grand-Father’s good name, and for the peace of my Aunt, who shun[n]ed all vulgarity, it makes me shudder to think of having the family name dragged before an unwilling public, and by a woman, who has brought nothing but a sword into the family. You would be held responsible naturally for any such performance, and would do more to injure any just fame that may belong to Aunt Emily, simply from a literary point of view, than any thing that could be done. Excuse my warmth on the subject, but as I am the only man left to represent generations of strong, forceful men who have preceded me, I feel I have the right to make my protest …
Very faithfully,
Edward Dickinson
Mabel Todd returned to Amherst in October, bringing Vinnie a gift of Japanese pottery. Vinnie received her with the usual kiss. Not a word to Mabel revealed the bomb about to explode in her face. Soon after, in the same month, Poems: Third Series came out. Vinnie’s waiting was now over. A few weeks later, when there was nothing more for the editor to do, Lavinia left town on a rare visit to Boston while Hammond & Field filed the Bill of Complaint on 16 November 1896. The Todds, it said, had obtained their new slice of Dickinson land by ‘misrepresentation and fraud’.
Mr Bumpus of Boston helped Mabel to prepare a Defendants’ Answer, registered a month later, on 14 December. She denied having made a request that no house be built on the land in question, and denied too that Lavinia was uninformed about the purpose of Mr Spaulding’s visit. These denials ring true. Even more convincing was her story about the fate of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Mabel Todd knew how to put together a coherent story of daunting challenges and eventual triumph, a story to outdo the pathos of Lavinia’s defrauding. It told of ‘ten’ years toil over poems and letters, for which Todd had received a paltry $200.*
The years she’d given to Dickinson had prevented her writing many ‘lucrative’ pieces, Todd declared. Miss Dickinson would urge her on, saying that Emily’s friends were dying and soon there’d be none to care whether the poems were published. Her Defendant’s Answer insisted that the editing had required discrimination, and it stressed David Todd’s part in transcribing poems in type, to reinforce the claim that Austin Dickinson had wished to deed the Todds a second plot of land as compensation for their work. He ‘had knowledge of the work, and complained because his sister failed to give Mrs Todd proper compensation. He agreed with Mrs Todd to give the latter the property in dispute, but before the deed could be executed Mr Dickinson died. In the autumn of that year [1895] the plaintiff [Lavinia] expressed to Mrs Todd acquiescence in her brother’s purpose and agreed that the land should be conveyed to Mrs Todd.’ The secrecy had been Miss Dickinson’s wish.
The Todds had a strong case. Lavinia’s allegations were, in the main, untrue. Mr Hills, who was so furious with Lavinia that he wished Mrs Todd to ‘wallop’ her, revealed that Lavinia had debated the land transfer in the autumn of 1895, before she signed the deed. (Testimonies conflict as to what Mr Hills had advised: so long as he favoured Mrs Todd, he claimed to have left the decision to Lavinia. She claimed to the contrary, that he’d warned her never to give land away to the Todds who, he said, were ‘leeches, leeches, leeches’.) Miss Seelye, his housekeeper, and her sister supported Mr Hills by reporting an unguarded comment from Maggie Maher to the effect that Miss Lavinia ‘knew perfectly well what she was doing when she signed the deed’.
Better still, Mr Spaulding stood ready to testify that he had conducted himself with legal propriety. This was never in question, and his evidence, given with a lawyer’s acumen, would make him a formidable witness for the defence. He would undoubtedly claim to have spelt it out to Miss Dickinson that she was about to sign a deed to hand over land. There had been no scope for misunderstanding.
Witnesses gathering for the defence were not the only reason that Lavinia found herself in a weak position. Mabel Todd was holding on to a massive cache of about six hundred poems as well as a hoard of Dickinson letters. Mabel entertained certain notions about her rights, a residue perhaps of promises Austin had made, assuming the power to control Lavinia even as that power was fading. Mabel continued to believe in the validity of the draft contract of 1894 that had granted her half the copyright in Dickinson letters, and she continued to believe as well (or so she said later) in an improbable notion that Lavinia had made a will before Austin died, leaving Mrs Todd substantial rights in the whole Dickinson oeuvre.
Mabel was able to retain the manuscripts, since Lavinia had willingly handed them over. To Lavinia, of course, it was merely a loan. The papers were at The Dell so that Todd could go on with their long-term project of editing as many as ten volumes. What Lavinia did not consider, or not enough, was that the public humiliation of the editor might affect their future project. Lavinia took the view that to edit Emily Dickinson was an honour. She did not pick up on the shortness of cash in Todd’s household, an oblivion soothed by Mabel’s pride in drawing a genteel veil over the matter of money, much as her mother had done.
The stress of Lavinia’s leap across the fissure, followed by preparations for legal battle, affected Lavinia’s heart. Her physician declared her unfit for a trial. At different times, Bumpus tried to settle out of court: if Mabel would return the land and the Dickinson papers then Lavinia would drop her charge.
‘All right,’ Mabel agreed, ‘but never until she admits on paper that she accused me falsely.’ It would have to be ‘an entire retraction’.
David said, ‘We have too good a case. I intend to go through with it.’ Yet for all the strength of the evidence in the Todds’ favour, there was a flaw in the case for the defence.
Astonishingly, it seems not to have occurred either to Mabel or David that a person with a secret who cares about hiding it for the sake of her reputation should not stand trial. When Bumpus, acting as Mrs Todd’s counsel, initially encouraged litigation he did not, it seems at that stage, know that Austin had wrested the prior plot of land from an unwilling family as a gift for Mrs Todd once Emily Dickinson was out of the way. No one outside the family knew that immediately following his sister’s death, when Austin had signed over the plot to his mistress, Susan Dickinson had shut herself in her room. She did not emerge for a day or two, helpless to defend her children against a father who repudiated them: ‘They never were my children,’ he told Mabel. Bumpus had no idea of the bitterness festering at The Evergreens for ten years since this ill deed in June 1886. Nor did Bumpus know for some time that Austin’s decision to give Mrs Todd a second gift of land went back to November 1887 — that is, before she began assigned work on the Dickinson papers.
The case due for February 1897 was postponed till the autumn, and then postponed again. Meanwhile, on 28 May of that year, a private cross-examination took place that was to have an immeasurable effect on the trial to come. Lavinia’s counsel, Mr J. C. Hammond, and Mabel’s counsel, Mr Bumpus, came to Northampton to take a deposition from Lavinia’s chief witness, Maggie Maher, who was leaving Massachusetts for a while and might not return in time for the trial.
The defence was up against a forty-three-year-old Irishwoman who since the age of twenty-eight had stood by Lavinia Dickinson in all she had done for the comfort and care of her parents and sister. Having lived at the Homestead for these years, since 1869, Maggie had seen and heard at close quarters what there was to see and hear from the time Mabel began to use the house on a regular basis in 1883. Her testimony was devastating as she exposed Mabel and Austin’s trysts. Since it was crucial to forestall speculation that the land was compensation for sexual favours, this undermined Mabel’s insistence that the land was compensation for ‘labor’ on Emily Dickinson.
Maggie’s testimony opposed this claim. She had heard Mrs Todd ‘often’ speak of her work on the poems as ‘a labor of love’. When the royalties for the first volume arrived Miss Lavinia had handed the bills and money to Mrs Todd in the dining room.
‘Is that right, Mrs Todd?’ she’d asked, and Mrs Todd had expressed herself ‘satisfied’ with what Miss Lavinia had shared.
Maggie described working at The Dell over a three-month period, when she had been there helping the Todds every day from three in the afternoon until eight in the evening ‘by Miss Dickinson’s wish’. She was not paid for this work: ‘I always told [Mrs Todd] I wanted no compensation; that I was doing it because she was editing Miss Emily’s poems for Miss Dickinson.’ Austin used to call between five and six, when Mr Todd would be in college. ‘I would see [Mr Dickinson] coming; I never let him in. He generally came in at the side door … Mrs Todd let him in.’
‘Did you observe any act of intimacy between Mr Dickinson and Mrs Todd?’ Hammond asked.
‘I remember at one time when Mr Dickinson brought some laurel to trim Mrs Todd’s front hall stairs, and he placed the laurel there for her in a large vase, and she put her arms around him and kissed him and said, “You dear old man”.’
Another scene had them embracing and kissing upstairs, ‘on the second landing’, as seen from the landing below. Maggie testified also that Mrs Todd had been alone with Mr Dickinson at The Evergreens when his family was away in 1893. He had asked Maggie to bring over lunch at one o’clock. She hadn’t seen Mrs Todd but had heard her singing at the piano. Three hours later Mrs Todd had stopped by to see Miss Dickinson, coming from the direction of The Evergreens.
‘Did you ever hear Mrs Todd say that she was not allowed by Mr Dickinson’s family to come to that house?’ Hammond interposed over sharp objection from Bumpus.
‘I have heard her say she was not allowed to go there. She would say that she was very sorry she couldn’t go there, and she didn’t know why she couldn’t. Miss Dickinson would answer to her, “You know the reason why.”’
Maggie’s most pointed testimony was that the pair had often been alone together at the Homestead. ‘They met very frequently; probably three or four times a week, sometimes in the afternoon and sometimes in the fore-noon, either in the dining room or the library. Sometimes for three or four hours just as their consciences allowed them. They met alone; the door was shut.’
She also recalled scenes when Mrs Todd had run out of funds: ‘I recollect another time she wanted to see him to get some money and she waited in the kitchen until she saw him come across from his house. They both went into the library, and an hour later she went home.’
Bumpus, with constant objections, did his best to obstruct what Maggie was saying, but she proved a careful, precise witness, not saying more than what she had observed. Bumpus could not block her acid remark as to what the consciences of the lovers ‘allowed’, since this moral opinion was embedded in a factual answer. No lawyer could have turned a defter phrase.
Hammond once more pressed Maggie ‘whether or not at any time at Miss Dickinson’s house you saw any act of intimacy between Mr Dickinson and Mrs Todd’.
Maggie recalled a scene that took place in 1891. The lovers hadn’t seen her, though she’d been no more than a foot away. ‘They came from the dining room to the kitchen. I was in the next room, which we call the wash-room, with the doors open. She put her arms around him and kissed him.’ They did this in silence. ‘They had been in the house about two hours.’
‘Did Miss Lavinia Dickinson know that Mr Dickinson, her brother, and Mrs Todd were in her house in the way you have stated?’ Bumpus demanded when it was his turn to cross-examine.
‘She did know it, but did not like it.’
All this was disagreeable news to Bumpus, and he could neither stop it coming nor shake Maggie’s integrity.
Did Maggie tell Miss Dickinson what she’d seen at The Dell?
‘I never did.’
‘You kept on working there afterwards?’
‘Yes sir, I did.’
‘I understand from your answers that you did not mention the kissing to Miss Dickinson and you remained in [Mrs Todd’s] employ in spite of what you saw there?’
‘I knew I was obliged to stay in her employ. I was doing it for Miss Dickinson, when Mrs Todd was working on the poems.’
Annoyed to have got nothing useful for the defence, Mr Bumpus tried confrontation. ‘Isn’t it a fact that you and Miss Dickinson have talked this matter over a great many times and you have told her in substance what you would testify to?’
Maggie stood her ground. ‘No, sir. I have nothing to testify to but the truth.’
Austin and Mabel had enjoyed long drives in the country, sometimes in summer making love on the way. When Hammond enquired into these, Maggie said the pair often went out, mostly in the afternoon but sometimes for a whole day. ‘Mr Dickinson would ask if she was ready, and she would answer, “Yes, always ready.” I heard these things myself. Mr Dickinson asked Miss Lavinia and me to put up a lunch. We always put it up.’ When they went in the afternoon they didn’t come back until eight or nine at night.
Maggie’s witness to these habits had the power to erode Mrs Todd’s contention that Austin Dickinson had wished to give her land as compensation for her work on his sister’s writings. Mabel Todd took every opportunity to stress her special relationship with Emily Dickinson. Maggie was emphatic in her denials that any such a relationship existed. This, ironically, was established by Mrs Todd’s counsel, Bumpus, as he tried to firm up the basis of her defence: the intimacy with the poet behind Todd’s work on the manuscripts.
‘Was Mrs Todd intimate with Miss Emily Dickinson?’
‘No. She was not.’
‘Was she acquainted with her?’
‘No. Only through notes.’
Bumpus questioned Maggie’s own tie. ‘Did you have anything to do with the poems or know where she kept them during her lifetime?’
‘She kept them in my trunk.’
‘How were they arranged or done up?’
‘They were done up in small booklets … tied together with a string.’
The interview with Maggie Maher was long and probing. The result was remarkably consistent. It proved, first, the poet’s trust in her servant in contrast to the distance she had put between herself and Mabel Todd. Secondly, it proved that the gift of land could not be dissociated from sexual favours. From the time this deposition was taken, it became as clear as Lavinia had intended that the forthcoming case about land was really about adultery.
* Mabel Loomis Todd’s papers show that she planned to publish the love letters as though she were editing them at the request of the anonymous lovers.
* Visitors to The Evergreens can see it there today.
* His name and Boston gentility prefigure the threatened sobrieties of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Aunt Helen and Cousin Nancy in T. S. Eliot’s early poems.
*Revived at the Savoy in London from July 1896.
* This amount, it will be recalled, represented two-thirds of Lavinia’s royalties on the first two volumes of ED’s poems. By the time that the case came to court, Mabel Todd mistakenly believed that Lavinia had received as much as $2000 and that half of it was her due. In fact, royalty statements from December 1894 to June 1898 show falling sales after the first thousand copies of the two-volume selection of ED’s letters. Lavinia was debited $604 for the electroplates. Mabel also mistakenly came to believe that the recent (fourth) contract had stipulated shared rights. (It’s not known whether Todd made this up because she felt it her due, or whether Lavinia had spurred her on with expectations.)