The notes below include all three major publications of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, since all are in use: the first complete scholarly edition, which Johnson brought out in 1955; the variorum edition by Franklin in 1998, which re-dated some poems, added poems from the letters and altered Johnson’s chronological numbering; and the digital and selective presentation of EDC (Emily Dickinson Correspondences) that eliminate editorial interventions between Dickinson manuscripts and the reader. The approximate dates below, from Franklin’s edition, may be too minutely identified not to remain questionable in some cases.
ABBREVIATIONS
I: A POET NEXT DOOR
3 four thousand: Franklin, The Editing of ED, 4–5.
3 wallpaper incident: Edward (Ned) Dickinson to ‘Mopsy’, his sister Martha Dickinson, who was at Miss Porter’s school in Farmington, Connecticut (26 Jan [1885]), marked ‘am’). Brown: St Armand Collection: 33.
4 ‘the paternal mansion’: SB to WAD, enquiring after ED. Houghton.
4 brown brick: TWH to his wife (1870), L342a.
4 ‘Exterior’: ‘This was a Poet —’ (c. late 1862), J448/Fr446.
4 ‘The Soul selects her own Society’: (c. 1862), J303/Fr409/EDC.
5 ‘The Soul that hath a Guest’: (c. 1863). J674/Fr592.
5 ‘Fortune’: ‘This was a Poet—’ (c. late 1862). J448/Fr446.
5 ‘Names of Sicknesses’: To Mrs Holland, L873. At this time, late 1883, the doctor called her sickness ‘nervous prostration’. It was soon after Gib’s death, but ED refers to ‘The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years’.
5 said to be different: ‘Since Gib’s death Emily was differently ill & alarmingly so’. LD to Clara Newman Turner and Anna Newman (23 Jan 1885). Houghton: bMS Am 1118.7.
6 ‘My Life had stood …’: (c. late 1863), J754/Fr764.
7 ‘Existence’: (c. spring 1863). J443 has the correct capital E (transcribed in the lower case in Fr522).
7 hints and guesses: T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets. He refers to what ED called the ‘Flash’.
7 ‘Bomb’; ‘Hold’; ‘calm’: ‘I tie my Hat’ (c. spring 1863). J443. MB, 555. Fr522 omits the penultimate stanza since in the booklet (number 24) there is a line under it, customarily used to indicate the end of a poem, but ED copied this stanza within the text of ‘I tie my Hat’ and it’s continuous with the preceding line. It’s a climactic stanza, a sequel to the first climax in the poem (‘struck — my ticking — through —’), fitting the explosive content of the alternative world within. Johnson’s transcription of this important poem should be restored.
7 ‘yellow eye’: ‘My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —’, op. cit.
7 ‘buckled lips’: ‘The reticent volcano’ (n.d.). J1748/ Fr1776. Transcribed by MLT and published in 1896.
7 ‘Abyss has no biographer —’: L899. Vendler, 71, associates abyss with the ‘fissure’ and ‘rupture’ of life’s ‘serial plot’. This appears an internal paradigm of the family plot disrupted by a feud.
7 ‘I’m Nobody!’: (c. late 1861). J288/Fr260.
7 ‘Wife — without the Sign!’: ‘Title divine — is mine!’ (c. 1861). J1072/Fr194.
8 ‘I tie my Hat’: (c. spring 1863). The poem is transcribed here from MB 553–5, the manuscript source for J443. (The transcription in Fr522 eliminates the penultimate stanza, which is relevant to the counter-domestic point of the poem.)
8 ‘eyes were full of…’: The Mill on the Floss (1860), book II, ch. 5.
9 ‘What have I done?’: ‘Millicent’s Life’, vol. iii (24 Sept 1881). Yale: box 116, f.454. Also, MLT’s Journals (24 Sept 1881). Yale: microfilm.
10 donor: James B. Germaine of Albany. MTB, TS notes for a talk with her father, 1967. Yale: box 47, f.14. Germaine left his money elsewhere.
10 card-dropping etiquette: Unfinished TS autobiography. Yale.
10 Mrs Stearns: MS memorial tribute (n.d.). Yale: box 78, f.315.
10 MLT’s hair: a lock in Yale collection.
11 thinnest white dress: MLT Journals. Yale: microfilm, reel 8.
11 ‘Exultation is the going’: pencil fair copy, addressed ‘Sue’ (c. early 1860). J76/ Fr143.
11 ‘Her talk …’; ‘quick …’; ‘seizes …’: From SHD’s obituary for ED in the Springfield Republican (May 1886). The tense of the verbs is changed from past to present.
11 MLT on Schubert: Yale: box 77, f.310. (37 MS pages.)
12 Emma offering scalloped oysters: Austen, Emma (1815).
12 WAD ‘delicate’: MLT, Journals, III, 185 (10 Nov 1882). Yale: microfilm.
12 ‘on the heights’: MLT, Journals, V (1886): a retrospect. Yale: microfilm.
12 MLT’s voice rang out; ‘Miss Emily’: MLT, Journals, III, 174 (15 Sept 1882). Yale: microfilm, reel 8.
13 ‘endure’: ‘Elysium is as far as to’. J1760/Fr1590. MLT had the impression that this poem was composed during her visit, c. 1882.
13 Austin’s diary: Yale.
14 ‘always watching’: Home, 413.
14 ‘She writes the strangest poems’: MLT, Journals, III, 174. Yale: microfilm.
15 ‘we all love you’: L311.
16 ‘sew alone’: L310.
16 ‘at the White Heat’: (c. 1862). J365/Fr401. One of three copies was sent to TWH.
16 ‘torrid spirit’; ‘Domingo’: L855. Domingo was associated with the production of rum and with its power to intoxicate.
16 books with ‘more’: The Mill on the Floss, book IV, ch. 3.
16 ‘still — Volcano — Life’: (c. spring 1863). J601/Fr517.
17 control: Juhasz, The Undiscovered Continent, 172–3.
17 ‘Fire rocks’: ‘On my volcano grows the Grass’. J1677/Fr1743. Transcribed by SHD.
17 ‘Will my great Sister…’: (c. 1883). L854.
17 ‘Your little mental gallantries …’: (c. 1883). L856.
II: ‘A STILL — VOLCANO — LIFE’
1: THE FIRST FAMILY
21 ‘pure and terrible’: (July 1874). L418. After her father’s death.
21 ‘I do not expect… pleasure’: Sewall, i, 47.
21 LD mimicked father: MLT’s notes of LD’s anecdotes. Yale: box 82, f.402.
21 ‘saw things … just as they were’: WAD, recollections of ED. Yale. Sewall, i, 222–3.
21 ‘startling’: LD to ED’s editor, Niles (3 Apr 1893). AC.
21 ‘the Soul’s Superior instants’: (c. 1863). J306/Fr630.
21 ‘simulate’: J443/Fr522.
22 ‘a sweet little song’: L7.
22 ‘Kangaroo’: L268. See the vivid poem ‘Kangaroo’, by D. H. Lawrence.
22 freckles: ED mentioned them to Mrs Bowles (c. Aug 1861), L235. She also mentions ‘my freckled bosom’ in ‘Rearrange a “Wife’s” Affections’, though in a poem it could be invention. In her youth the scoop-necked dresses of the 1840s would have exposed her chest to the sun (unlike the buttoned-up, collared style of the 1860s and her famous white dress).
22 ED’s voice: Elicited by MLT. In her TS essay, ‘ED: Poet and Woman’. Yale.
22 WAD’s similar interrogative lift: Evident in letters to MLT.
23 ‘Wild nights — Wild nights!’: (c. late 1861). J249/Fr269.
23 Aunt Elizabeth registered as male: Habegger, 129.
23 ‘only male relative on the female side’: ED to Mrs Holland (Aug 1876). L473.
23 Bennett’s advice book: EDR.
23 ‘letter to the World’: (c. spring 1863). J441/Fr519.
23 ‘for what is each instant …’: L656 (c. early Sept 1880).
23 ‘Oh! Caroline …’: Caroline Dutch, Habegger deduces. She later taught ED at Amherst Academy.
24 ‘I am sensible …’ and ‘I think …’: Cited in Habegger, 42, 43.
25 ‘kiss’ and ‘-s’: Cited in Habegger, 54.
25 ‘Requirement’: ‘unmentioned’; ‘Fathoms …’: (c. early 1864). J732/Fr857. Habegger, 56, speculates plausibly that the poem looks back to her parents’ union.
26 ‘I think you will learn …’: Jane Eyre, ch. 14.
26 ‘If you were God …’: To Elbridge Bowdoin. L28.
26 ‘Oh what an afternoon …’: (c. early 1860). J148/Fr146. Habegger, 226, notes how ED ‘made heaven the beneficiary’.
26 The Mother At Home: By John Stevens Cabot Abbott. Copies in EDR, Mudd Library, Yale, and Library of Congress.
26 ‘rigid discipline’; ‘unimpassioned’: Ibid, 63–4.
27 ‘perusing such papers only …’: L63.
28 ‘fire’: Reported by Lavinia Norcross to Emily’s mother. She had fetched little Emily at the time of Lavinia’s birth and was driving with her to Monson when a terrific storm broke. McCarthy discovered letters from Lavinia Norcross to her sister, and mentions this incident in his letter to Mary Landis Hampson (20 Sept 1949). Houghton: bMs Am 118.97–118.98 (123)
28 ‘cordiality’, etc: To Clara Newman Turner (c. 1884). L926. Cited by Sewall, i, 269.
28 ‘Born — Bridalled — Shrouded —’: ‘Title divine — is mine!’ (c. 1861). J1072/Fr194. See also ch. 4.
28 Mrs Dickinson’s ‘burning tear’: Verse by her sister Lavinia Norcross. Habegger, 67.
29 The Belle of Amherst: (1976) by William Luce.
30 language of her own: Cogently argued by Cristanne Miller, ED: A Poet’s Grammar.
30 ‘Father steps …’: Cited by Ward, ‘Secret’, 91.
30 WAD to boarding school: (1846) Williston Seminary in Easthampton, Massachusetts.
30 ‘looking very stately’: L45.
31 genealogy and dates of the Dickinson family in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/marshall/esmd83.htm
31 date of the voyage; sons killed: Ibid. The sons were killed in King Philip’s War.
32 ‘Cousin Zebina …’: L4.
32 fear of fits and croup: (16 Feb 1838). Houghton. Quoted in Habegger, 98.
32 ‘coming out’: MDB, FF, 87–8.
32 seat of the sciences and ‘It is still ours …’: Oration (1795) at Dartmouth. DFP. Houghton
32 ‘depression of spirits’: Catharine Dickinson Sweetser (29 Apr 1838), cited by Habegger, 106.
33 ‘Swelling of the Ground’: ‘Because I could not stop for Death —’ (c. 1862). J712/Fr479.
33 ED recalling Sophia: To Abiah Root (28 Mar 1846). L32.
34 Abiah Root: Attended the Academy c. 1843–4.
34 Mrs Fiske’s death: Habegger, 170–1.
34 ‘the early spiritual influences …’: To Maria Whitney (c. May 1883). L824, cited Fr1605.
34 ‘It was given to me …’: (c. late 1862). J454/Fr455.
35 ‘no verse …’: L751.
35 Amherst in ED’s girlhood, prayer meetings and ‘low sad tones’ etc: SHD, TS of ‘Amherst Half a Century Ago’. DFP. Houghton.
36 ED in the cellar: MLT’s notes on LD’s recollections. Yale: box 82, f.402.
36 ‘I miss you …’: L3.
36 ‘entertain …’: L5.
37 ‘letter to the World’: (c. 1863). J441/Fr519.
37 ‘I am always in love …’: to Abiah Root (14 Mar 1847). L45.
38 ‘press you to my arms’: L12.
38 mad letter; ‘God is sitting here’ etc: L31.
38 ‘I love to be surly …’: To Jane Humphrey in the same month (23 Jan 1850). L30.
2: A SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION
39 ED on the classics side: She returned to the English side in 1846–7 for her final year in high school. (During that year SHD was on the classics side.)
39 specimens: ED, Herbarium.
39 Elementary Geology: Copy in EDR.
40 ‘eternity of matter’: Ibid., 274.
40 ‘the future destruction …’: Ibid., 281.
40 ‘red hot lava …’: Ibid., 228.
40 ‘Etna’s scarlets’: ‘More Life — went out — when He went’ (c. autumn 1862). J422/Fr415.
40 ‘Lava step’: ‘Volcanoes be in Sicily’ (transcribed by SHD). J1705/Fr1691.
41 ED’s school compositions: WAD’s recollections. Yale. Sewall, i, 222–3.
41 ‘the sillyest creature …’: To Jane Humphrey (1842). L3.
42 ED’s piano: EDR. Replica at the Homestead.
42 ‘too busy …’: To TWH (1862). L261.
42 first women’s college: Elizabeth Reid’s Bedford College for Women opened in London in 1849. It was designed in opposition to the conservative Queen’s College run by men and aiming at the education of governesses (destined for exploitation and misery — see Kathryn Hughes, The Victorian Governess). Bedford had an all-women board of governors. A women’s medical college opened in Philadelphia in 1850.
42 number enrolled at Holyoke: Green, Mary Lyon, points out that this was the fall intake in 1847, and that over the course of the academic year this number would have dwindled. The intake was a good deal higher than the one hundred and thirty-five men enrolled in Amherst College.
43 ‘wholesome & abundant’: L18.
43 ‘“Faith” is a fine invention’: (c. 1860). J185/Fr202.
43 ED remained seated: Clara Newman Turner, ‘My Personal Acquaintance with ED’. Houghton. Sewall, i, 265–75. There has been some rather puzzling scepticism about the veracity of this anecdote. It’s puzzling because other anecdotal information from MLT has been accepted uncritically, though she doesn’t always tell the truth. There are fashions in who might be trusted. In this case the language of the anecdote does fit ED’s style. Scholars are rightly sceptical of a similar anecdote from MDB, suggesting open defiance, for ED took care not to give offence in religious matters.
43 ‘Have you said your prayers?’: ED must have reported this to LD, who repeated the retort to a teacher at Smith College, Miss Jordan, who was interviewed by MTB (3–4 Nov 1934) in preparation for AB. Although Miss Jordan was sometimes given to partisan gossip, the retort does ring true. Sewall, i, 263.
43 meeting on 17 Jan: Green, Mary Lyon, 248–9.
44 ‘many sweet girls’: L20.
44 Miss Lyon discouraged exclusive friendships: Later in the century Miss Porter, at her fashionable school in Farmington, Connecticut, resisted the close friendship of Minny Temple, Henry James’s cousin, and Helena de Kay (Gilder).
44 ‘Miss Fiske told …’: L16.
44 ‘pulmonary episodes’: Norbert Hirschhorn and Polly Longsworth, ‘Medicine Posthumous: A New Look at ED’s Medical Condition’, New England Quarterly, 69 (June 1996), 299–316.
44 ED not tubercular as an adult: In the flow of a lively anecdote about her father when ED was in her forties (L401), she tossed off an announcement, accompanied by a dramatising exclamation mark, that she was ‘in consumption’ as a baby. In tone and context, the remark is too airy to be convincing but has gained credence by the weighty tone of critics who take it out of context, saying that she was ‘diagnosed’ with the disease.
45 ‘struck’: ‘I tie my Hat’, op. cit.
45 ‘A desolate feeling …’: L22.
46 ‘real ogres’: MLT’s notes of LD’s snippets of memory. Yale: box 82, f.402.
46 Hannah Porter: Three College letters were sent to Porter. Habegger, 28–30, opened up this aspect as part of his well-judged consideration of ‘the massive presence of Calvinist evangelicalism in ED’s life’. See too Habegger, ‘Evangelicalism and its Discontents: Hannah Porter versus ED’, New England Quarterly, 70 (Sept 1997), 386–414.
47 read Jane Eyre: ED borrowed the novel at the end of 1849. That winter she acquired Carlo, a Newfoundland dog.
47 Lavinia at boarding school: LD went to Wheaten Female Seminary in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
48 ‘we do not have much poetry …’: To WAD (15 Dec 1851). L65.
48 friction with mother: MLT’s notes on LD’s snippets of memory. Yale: box 82, f.402.
49 failure of friendships: L15.
49 ‘silent’ letters: (23 Jan 1850). L30.
50 ‘Experiment to me’: Sent first to SHD (c. 1865). J1073/Fr1081.
50 accused Jane etc: L81, L86.
50 ED and Shakespeare: Emily Fowler Ford’s recollections of their girlhood for MLT’s edition of ED’s Letters (1894), 129–30.
51 ‘the integrity of the private mind’: Essay: ‘Self-Reliance’.
51 Anne Hutchinson and dissent: Ronald Bush, Oxford lecture on ED (18 Jan 2006).
52 Hawthorne on women’s public utterance: ‘Woman’ in Hawthorne (NY: The Library of America). Amy Lang, Anne Hutchinson and Dissent in New England (Univ of California Press, 1988).
53 ‘the infinitude of the private man’: ‘Self-Reliance’. The source is Emerson’s Journal: ‘In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man …’. (7 Apr 1840).
53 gave her Emerson: ED to Jane Humphrey (23 Jan 1850). L30. First edition (1847). EDR.
53 ‘touched the secret Spring’: ED to Judge Otis Lord (30 Apr 1882). L750.
53 ‘stinging rhetoric’; ‘bullets’: Journals (24 June 1840). ED had no access to his journals but, since Emerson repeats his message over and over, she would have picked up these injunctions elsewhere.
53 ‘In silence …’: Ibid. (11 June 1840).
53 ‘I tire of shams, I rush to be’: Quoted in Santayana’s essay on ‘Emerson the Poet’, Santayana on America, ed. Richard Colton Lyon (NY: Harcourt, 1968)
54 ‘I shall’: (23 Jan 1850). L30.
54 letter to Joel Norcross: L29 (11 Jan 1850). MLT did not include this in her selection of 1894. It did not fit the Dickinson image she was promoting.
54 ‘a lie …’: Habegger, 228, suggests a broken promise.
55 lava and fire associated with feminists of 1848; volcanic cartoon; the Vésuviennes: Bonnie Anderson, ‘Volcano Time’ in Joyous Greetings, ch. 7.
55 ‘No law …’: ‘Self-Reliance’.
56 ‘She felt a dangerous power …’: Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds, 127.
56 April 1850 letter to Jane Humphrey: L35.
58 ‘mamed’: (22 June 1851). L44.
58 ‘often wrote’: ED to the Revd Edward Everett Hale (13 Jan 1854). L153.
58 a retrospect on BFN’s message: L153.
58 ‘My dying Tutor…’: To TWH (7 June 1862). L265.
58 ‘If I live …’: To TWH (1876). L457. In this letter she speaks of BFN as ‘my earliest friend’, and she’s thinking of his death in the context of her father’s ‘lonely Life and his lonelier Death’.
58 ‘Title divine — is mine!’: Sent to SB (c. 1861) and SHD (c. 1865). J1072/Fr194/EDC.
58 ‘Newton is dead’: (27 Mar 1853). L110.
58 ED’s letter to BFN’s minister: L153, op. cit.
59 ‘My life closed …’: J1732/ Fr1773. Undated. Transcribed by MLT, who eliminated dashes.
59 ‘boots and whiskers’: To Abiah Root (17 May 1850). L36.
59 ‘Papa above’: (c. early 1860). J10/Fr151.
59 Jacob wrestles: Genesis: xxxiii, 24–32.
59 ‘worsted God’: ‘A little East of Jordan’ (c. early 1860). J59/Fr145.
60 ‘The Soul selects…’: J303/Fr409/EDC, op. cit.
60 timely mentor: Charlotte Brontë too had this luck when she became the pupil of M. Heger in 1842–3.
60 ‘new — and small’ etc: J454/Fr455. See p. 34, above. The following paragraph picks up this poem.
3: SISTER
61 did not disguise: Her outcries are similar to Florence Nightingale’s in Cassandra. They have to do with the artifice of women’s assumed character and middle-class ways of life in the mid-nineteenth century. In Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon (London: Viking; NY: Farrar, 2008), 356, Mark Bostridge speaks of an intensity verging on madness.
61 ‘blessed’ night: To Jane Humphrey (3 Apr 1850). L35.
61 ‘in rebellion’: Ibid.
61 ‘the author in me’: draft letter to SHD. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
61 ‘little ninny’: L45.
62 ‘Topknot’ etc: L37. The name is presumably a reference to the topknot of hair worn by high-caste males in ancient Japan.
62 Susan Gilbert’s birth: 19 Dec 1830, nine days after ED. I’m indebted to Martha Nell Smith’s brief biography of SHD on the internet site for her.
62 Thomas Gilbert’s bankruptcy: MLT in ‘MLT Speaks’ (1931), who was bent on slander and whose testimony can’t therefore be trusted, says that SHD’s brother, Dwight Gilbert, paid the town for their father’s upkeep in the ‘poorhouse’. There is no other evidence, so far, that he was ever in a poorhouse, and the allegation is likely to have been part of MLT’s claim that SHD had despicable origins.
64 Again … ‘in love’: In the same way she’d been ‘in love’ with her teachers at school. It could be more than a crush but less than acknowledged lesbian love. There were elements of romantic ardour in nineteenth-century attachments — Dorothy Wordsworth’s for her brother, Tennyson’s for Arthur Hallam, Charlotte Brontë’s for Ellen Nussey — that don’t fit sexual labels because the demonstrativeness and the declarations of love were largely emotional.
64 ‘little world of sisters’; ‘sainted Mary’: L38.
64 Vinnie’s diary: For 1851. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
65 ‘You won’t cry …’: L88.
65 ‘stupid’, ‘I fancy …’: L56.
65 would not permit anything to blossom: L92.
66 favourite passage in Shirley: unspecified, alas.
66 ‘Dollie is stuffed with sawdust’: (8 June 1851). L42.
66 ‘For our sakes …’: To WAD (29 June 1851). L45.
67 men’s clothes and ‘P.O.M. Meetings’: SHD, ‘Amherst Half a Century Ago’.
67 Lyman and the Dickinsons: Habegger’s well-researched account, 184–7.
68 Vinnie’s kisses: The Lyman Letters; Habegger, 185.
68 Hester Prynne’s hair: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
68 WAD ‘long fainting …’: Draft letter to SHD, after spring 1853. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
68 WAD as schoolmaster: Spring 1851 until summer 1852. After that read law in father’s office until he entered Harvard Law School in spring 1853.
69 WAD’s comic virulence: L43.
69 ‘Lady Susan’: (24 July 1850). WAD goes in for this fantasy in a letter of condolence to Sue on the death of her sister. Houghton.
69 ‘very high style of rapture’: To WAD (22 June 1851). L115.
69 Martha’s eyes alight: (Sept 1851). L52.
70 drafts of WAD’s letters to Martha Gilbert: Home, 162. After forty years he gave them to MLT, who passed them on to her daughter.
70 ‘She thinks a great deal …’: (11 Nov 1851). L62.
70 ‘I give all your messages …’: (15 Dec 1851). L65.
70 Amity Street: The vicinity of Amherst Academy and Amherst House, where Sue had lived with her parents from the ages of two till six, and where the Todds would board on their arrival in the early 1880s.
70 ‘You and I…’: L93.
71 ‘hard heart of stone’; ‘a big future’: L85.
71 plantain leaf in herbarium: Herbarium, 56. In her Preface, Judith Farr notes that ED’s arrangement of her botanical finds provides ‘a kind of colloquy among specimens’.
72 ‘I so love to be a child’: To Abiah Root (c. late 1850). L39.
72 crack time away; ‘I need her …’: L85.
72 ‘Has it occurred to you …’: A & M, 85.
73 volume of Poems: SHD had dated it Jan 1853.
73 ‘some punkins’; ‘I am really lonely …’: A & M, 85.
74 ‘On this wondrous sea’: J4/Fr3. Preceded only by ED’s two valentines, this is the earliest serious poem to survive.
74 Sue … appreciated Mr Dickinson: ED’s report to WAD (16 May 1853), saying that their father felt Sue appreciated him more than almost anyone else. L123.
75 ‘Forgive me now Mattie …’: DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95. The word ‘spoiled’ is unclear.
75 WAD’s capacity for hero worship: SHD, ‘Annals of the Evergreens’.
76 ED advised WAD: L65.
76 pure and terrible: See opening paragraph of ch. 1.
76 ‘affliction’; ‘Micawber’: L49.
76 ‘Sue has eaten broth …’: L167.
77 ‘Sue— you can go …’: L173.
78 ‘How did Sue look?’ etc: ED to SHD. L177.
78 women without dowries: the Wollstonecraft sisters, the Brontë sisters, MLT, the Temple sisters are some examples of those who did not expect to marry or who faced the difficulty.
78 Mr Cratchett’s: At the corner of 6th and D streets. Houghton Mifflin to MDB (1 May 1930). Houghton: bMs Am 118.97–1118.98 (11)
79 Wadsworth: See vivid portraits by Benfey, Hummingbirds, 121–2, and Wineapple, White Heat, 71.
79 ‘dark secrets’: Recalled after Wadsworth’s death in 1882 to James D. Clark. L776. Cited by Habegger, 331.
79 ‘Jennie — my Jenny Humphrey …’ etc: (16 Oct 1855). L180.
80 ‘gone-to-Kansas’; ‘deathless me’: To Mrs Holland. L182. Cited by Sewall, ii, 466.
80 Mrs Dickinson on the sofa: Pollak and Noble, ‘A Brief Biography’ in A Historical Guide, 23, note her ‘need for more emotional support’ from her husband.
81 ‘My Wheel is in the dark’: Sent to SHD (c. early 1859). J10/Fr61. It’s what Yeats termed the dark of the moon: the inchoate creative act. Eliot called it the ‘first voice’ of poetry (in ‘Three Voices of Poetry’). The poem also speaks of traversing ‘the unfrequented road’, reminding one of Frost’s later choice: the road least travelled by. Vendler, 65, discusses this poem in her essay on ED’s ‘serial plot’.
81 lamp, book: ‘I was the slightest in the House’ (c. 1862). J486/Fr473.
81 ‘Banker’: ‘I never lost as much but twice’ (c. 1858). J49/Fr39.
82 ‘So stationed …’: ‘I was the slightest in the House’, op. cit.
82 Chaucer: ‘Truth’.
82 Yeats: ‘A General Introduction to my Work’ (1937).
82 ‘Noteless’; I could not bear …’: ‘I was the slightest in the House’, op. cit.
82 ‘shrill morning call’: (24 Dec 1851). L66.
82 dedication to father: ‘Sleep is supposed to be’. J13/Fr35.
82 ‘wild, erratic natures’: ‘The Heart’s Astronomy’. Elaine Showalter, lecture on American women writers (Oxford, 11 May 2006) and A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Ann Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Virago, 2009), 77–80.
83 Samuel Howe and Florence Nightingale: Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 86.
83 ‘troubled …’: WAD’s draft of a letter to SHD. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95. Even if he didn’t send a fair copy, this is likely to have been a basis for discussion.
83 The Evergreens: Designed by William Fenno Pratt of Northampton, Massachusetts.
84 Aurora Leigh: Ellen Moers makes connections with ED in Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1978), 55–62, 165–70, 244–5, 285–6.
84 ‘I think I was enchanted …’; ‘Foreign Lady’; ‘Mighty Metres …’: (c. 1863). J593/Fr627.
84 ED’s hairstyle: Recalled by LD in the 1890s when she rejected the daguerreotype as the appropriate image of ED. LD wrote to her cousin John Graves, ‘Emily and I always wore our hair this way because it was the way Elizabeth Barrett Browning did.’
85 Memoirs of Rachel: By Mme A. de Barrera. Inscribed ‘Emily Dickinson’ by SHD. EDR.
85 ED’s poem on Currer Bell: ‘All overgrown by cunning moss’ (c. early 1860, possibly 31 March, the fifth anniversary of CB’s death). J148/Fr146.
85 not ‘at all like …’; trumpet; ‘condensed …’: Charlotte Brontë, Biographical Notice to the posthumous edition of her sisters’ works (London: Smith Elder, 1850). Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, ch. 14.
86 ‘more electric …’: To Mrs Holland (early May 1883). L822. Mary F. Robinson’s life of Emily Brontë was published in Roberts Brothers Famous Women Series (15 Apr 1883).
86 ‘the Maid in black’: (c. late 1859). L209.
86 Kate Scott Turner: Born in 1831. Married Campbell Ladd Turner in 1855, who died two years later. She and ED corresponded between 1859 and 1866, the year when Kate married John Anthon.
86 ED improvising at the piano: Letter (1914) from Kate Scott Turner (Anthon) to MDB after SHD’s death, recalling that visit. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
87 ‘Condor Kate’: (c. summer 1860). L222.
87 ‘my girls’ etc: (c. Mar 1859). L203. Written after Kate’s departure on 18 Feb.
87 ‘unnatural evenings’ etc: To Kate Scott Turner (c. late 1859). L209.
87 ‘When Katie kneels …’: L208.
88 Emerson at The Evergreens: Sewall, ii, 468. There is no evidence whether ED attended the lecture.
88 The Angel in the House: Popular Victorian poem by Coventry Patmore (Boston, 1856).
88 SHD’s note to ED: DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
89 ‘By such and such …’: (c. late 1858). J38/Fr47.
90 ‘Fortunate for us …’: To WAD. L87.
90 ‘not like us’: L78.
90 SHD’s copy of Goethe: EDR.
90 booklets: Known to scholars as ‘fascicles’, but this word is not ED’s. It was introduced by MLT in 1890 when she co-edited the first selection of ED’s poems, four years after the poet’s death. The booklets are also known as ‘packets’ but this gives the wrong impression. What ED intends is a home-made book of about six pages of notepaper that the author folded and threaded together.
90 ‘One Sister’: (c. 1858–9). J14/Fr5/L197/EDC. The copy sent to SHD (possibly, Johnson suggests, for her twenty-eighth birthday on 19 Dec 1858) was signed ‘Emilie’ and is pasted into MDB’s copy of The Single Hound, the first selection of poems published by MDB in 1914, immediately after her mother’s death.
91 ‘Domingo’: L833, op. cit.
91 ‘the little tippler’: ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’ (c. 1861). J214/Fr207.
91 poem to ‘Dollie’: ‘I often passed the Village’ (c. 1858). J51/Fr41. ED acquired the 1857 edition of Wuthering Heights, which is presumably when she read it.
92 erotic: See Martha Nell Smith, Rowing in Eden, and Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith (eds), Open Me Carefully, who make a strong case for same-sex love. See also EDC.
92 ‘No Words …’ etc: (c. 1884). L913.
93 ‘Bomb’: ‘I tie my Hat’ (c. 1863). J443. Fr omits the semi-final stanza including the ‘Bomb’ in the breast, which should not be detached from the speaker’s domestic aspect. That would seem to be the point of the poem. Johnson transcribes it correctly.
94 ‘Existence’: Franklin transcribes what looks like a capital E as lower case. ED tends to use capitals for important abstract nouns.
94 ‘Fire … gun’: ‘I have never seen “Volcanoes” —’ (c. 1860). J175/Fr165.
94 ‘a quiet — Earthquake style —’: ‘A still — Volcano — Life’ (c. spring 1863). J601/Fr517.
94 ‘buckled’: ‘The reticent volcano’ (n.d. — MS believed lost). J1748/Fr1776.
94 ‘Tell the truth but tell it slant’: (c. 1872). J1129/Fr1263.
94 ‘I am alive I guess’: (c. summer 1863). J470/Fr605.
94 ‘I felt my life with both my hands’: (c. summer 1862). J351/Fr357.
94 ‘twinkled back’: Ibid.
94 He touched me; I groped …: ‘He touched me’ (c. summer 1862). J506/Fr349.
94 ‘Rowing in Eden’: ‘Wild nights — Wild nights!’, op. cit.
95 mistake to read … literally: Benfey, Hummingbirds, 245, concludes: ‘Her “master letters” seem, in retrospect, experiments in enacting a grand passion on the page.’
95 ‘They were disobedient …’: (c. spring 1858). L187. First ‘Master’ letter.
96 ‘Oh did I offend …’: L248. Dated by Johnson ‘early 1862’ but now thought to be early 1861. Second ‘Master’ letter.
96 ‘Tomahawk …’: Ibid.
96 ‘Fuschzia …’ and ‘Cactus …’: ‘I tend my flowers for thee’ (c. autumn 1862). J339/Fr367.
96 ED’s weight: MLT, Journals, V (1 Sept 1886). Yale: microfilm.
97 third ‘Master’ letter: L233.
97 ‘nail in my breast’: (c. late May 1863). L281.
97 closer to exercises in composition: Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1985), 24–7: ‘These three letters were probably self-conscious exercises in prose by one writer playing with, listening to, and learning from others.’
97 ‘words obey my call’: ‘Words’, The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910).
98 ‘I cannot dance upon my toes’ etc: (c. 1862). J326/Fr381.
99 ‘Face out of Paradise’: L489.
99 Bret Harte: SB introduced him to the Dickinsons.
99 ‘shaggy manner’: ‘Annals of Evergreens’.
99 SHD’s submission of ‘Nobody knows’: Habegger, 389. J35/Fr11.
99 ‘Has girl …’: SHD to ED (n.d.). DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
99 one of Bowles’s earliest letters: Habegger dug up the date of this birth: 15 May 1859.
100 ‘I have made [women] shed many tears’: Cited by Farr, 205, from SB’s biographer, George Merriam (1884): a woman who visited SB’s newspaper in 1865 reported his words.
101 ‘tnal …’ and ‘torture …’: To SHD (26 Feb [1864]).
101 ‘the late flirtatious widow’: To WAD (n.d., probably 1863).
101 ‘Mrs Bowles …’: SB to WAD (16 Jan [1859]).
102 ‘I would not, if I could …’: SB to WAD ([Feb 1859]).
102 limp along; ‘Utica schoolgirls’: To WAD (Oct 1861).
102 ‘wanton & fickle’: To SHD (26 Feb [1864]).
102 SB did not want to be drawn too far: This is a guess on the basis that had SB a just estimate of ED’s poems, he’d have expressed it in letters to her brother and Sue, and that ED herself would have reflected this in her letters to him. Then, too, she might not have taken up with Higginson had she had better hopes of SB.
102 ‘the Queen Recluse …’: To WAD (9 Jan 1863).
102 ‘spiritual manifestations’: SB to the Dickinsons (2 Jan [1859]).
102 for the sister…’: To WAD (4 Feb 1859). Houghton.
102 ‘a savage, turbulent state …’: to WAD (2 May 1863).
102 ‘If it had no pencil’: (c. early 1861). J921/Fr184. Letter amongst those sent to the Bowles family. Habegger, who favours Wadsworth as ‘Master’, suggests it was sent to Mary. Unlikely because of the erotic charge. ED was not attracted to Mary.
103 ‘Two swimmers’: (c. spring 1861). J201/Fr227.
103 intruder on a marriage: ‘Wife — without the Sign!’ op. cit.
103 ‘I’m “wife” …’: ‘I’m “wife” — I’ve finished that’ (c. spring 1861). J199/Fr225.
104 ‘A wife — at Daybreak …’: (c. 1861). J461/Fr185.
104 general conception etc: Draws on Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights’.
104 ‘the endless … hereafter’: Nelly Dean seeing Catherine dead in Wuthering Heights, ch. 16.
105 ‘Vesuvius at Home’: ‘Volcanoes be in Sicily’, op. cit.
106 ‘I cant thank you any more …’: (c. early 1862). L252.
107 ‘Could you leave “Charlie” …’: (c. early Mar 1862). L253.
107 ‘Title divine’: J1072/Fr194. L250, where the date is c. early 1862.
107 ‘Here’s what…’: L250.
107 SB’s confidence to WAD: When Bowles had visited The Evergreens with his wife in 1861.
108 ‘have as much as ever …’: SB to WAD. Habegger’s transcript of these letters on the internet.
108 ‘I’ve nothing Else …’: (c. spring 1861). J224/Fr253.
108 SB and ‘Lady-writers’: Farr, 205, takes this from Merriam.
108 SB’s ‘bullet’ and the third Master letter: Neat link by Farr.
108 Arabian’: L662.
108 ‘manikins’: Farr, 185.
108 ‘little gems’: (13 July 1862). SB refers again to her poems as ‘gems’ in a letter (3 Dec 1864): ‘gems for the “Springfield Musket”’.
109 ‘puzzled’: J224/Fr253.
109 ‘little tippler’: op. cit.
109 ‘Safe in their alabaster chambers’: (c. 1859, 1861). J216/Fr124/EDC. (Fr and EDC include SHD’s critique.)
109 Fidelia Cooke: Habegger, 383–4.
109 The Household Book of Poetry: ed. Charles Anderson Dana (1819–97), sixth edition (NY, 1860). EDR.
109 ‘to New England’: (c. summer 1861). L233. The third ‘Master’ letter.
109 Shakespeare’s sonnets in the mid-space: Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (Pimlico, 2005), 249.
109 Ann Wroe: Being Shelley (London: Cape, 2007), 83.
110 ‘letter to the World’: ‘This is my letter to the world’ (c. spring 1863). J441/Fr519.
111 the need to speak: Poet Liam Rector describes dashes as ‘the connective tissue which begins to function like words themselves’. We hear ‘the need to speak’. ‘Bidart’s The Sacrifice’, On Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page, ed. Liam Rector and Tree Swenson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 130–1.
111 ‘a terror …’: (25 Apr 1862). L261. Farr, who makes a strong case for SB as Master, suggests that ED’s upheaval was occasioned by his decision to go to Europe.
111 ‘palsy’: To TWH (7 June 1861). L265.
112 ‘half angel, half demon’: MDB heard this from Ned. Cited by Farr, 215.
112 ‘Hearts in Amherst — ache …’: L259.
113 ‘I cannot see you’: L276.
113 ‘Keep the Yorkshire Girls …’ and ‘Please to need me …’: L299 and L300.
113 ‘Ethiop within’: ‘More Life — went out—’ (c. 1862). J422/Fr415.
113 ‘Ourself behind ourself, concealed —’: ‘One need not be’ (c. 1862; c. early 1864 copy sent to Sue). J670/Fr407.
5: ‘SNARL IN THE BRAIN’
114 ‘Snarl in the Brain’: ED to Loo (c. late May 1863). L281.
114 ‘Existence’: J443, op cit.
114 DNA as tragedy: I owe this to Laura Sims, University of Oxford, when we discussed biography across the table at the Helen Gardner Feast, St Hilda’s College (9 Feb 2007).
114 ‘My loss …’: Final stanza of ‘My first well Day — since many ill —’ (c. spring 1863, copied in booklet 28). J574/Fr288. Earlier (Nov 1862) ED sent a version of the quoted single stanza to SB (at the time of his return from his convalescent journey to Europe). L275. The Bowles version disguises the personal source (‘My’) in ‘you’, as though speaking for a sick Bowles. Seth Archer quotes the same stanza in his 2009 article on panic attacks, noting that ‘anxiety, panic, and mental anguish somehow brought her closer to this beloved sense of immortality’.
114 ‘As One does Sickness over’: J957/Fr917.
115 ‘A Clock stopped’: (c. late 1861). J287/Fr259.
115 ‘Agony’; ‘Convulsion’: ‘I like a look of Agony’. J241/Fr339.
115 ‘Transport’ taught ‘by throe’: ‘Water is taught by thirst’ (c. 1859). J135/Fr93.
115 ‘Spasmodic’; ‘uncontrolled’: L265.
115 Mark Bostridge on posthumous diagnoses: Florence Nightingale, 324.
115 ‘Dying!’: (c. spring 1861). J158/Fr222.
115 ‘some strange Race’: ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ (c. summer 1862). J280/Fr340.
116 ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’; ‘dropped down’: Ibid. See Vendler, 73, on extinction of consciousness.
116 ‘Cleaving’: (c. early 1864). J937 and 992/Fr867. Sent to SHD, who was in the know. Vendler, 71. Habegger, 477, cites this poem as an example of ED’s poetic registration of ‘the fear that one may be coming apart’. He adds: ‘No other American writer of her time explored with equal sensitivity and mastery the experience of fragmentation.’
116 ‘off my head’: ‘If ever the lid gets off my head’ (c. summer 1863). J1727/Fr585.
116 ‘scalps’: ‘He fumbles at your soul’ (c. late 1862). J315/Fr477/EDC and ‘Nature — sometimes sears a Sapling—’ (c. late 1862). J314/Fr457.
116 ‘Nature — sometimes sears a Sapling —’: Ibid.
116 ‘Dread’: ‘I lived on Dread—’ (c. late 1862). J770/Fr498.
116 ‘to simulate is stinging work’: J443, op. cit.
116 ‘Presentiment’: ‘Presentiment — is that long shadow — on the Lawn —’ (c. late 1862). J764/Fr841.
117 ‘Winds’; ‘Thunderbolt’; ‘Universe’: ‘He fumbles at your Soul’, op. cit. Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar, 115, comments perceptively: ‘As a narrative event, the poem may reveal the speaker’s attempt to outlive an overwhelming experience by articulating it in a universalized verbal and pronominal form: this happens to “you,” not (just?) her. The present tense may imply that she continuously relives the sequence even while trying to distance herself from it by representing it as universal, or prophetic of someone else’s life.’
117 ‘electric gale’: ‘With Pinions of Disdain’ (c. 1877). J1431/Fr1448.
117 ‘by birth a Bachelor’: L204. Aged 28. Recent research on epilepsy by Dr Jane Mellanby in the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, has found that epileptic monkeys are demoted in the social hierarchy and unlikely to mate.
117 ‘The Brain within its Groove’: (c. 1862). J556/Fr563. Deppman, 94–8.
117 ‘Murder by degrees’; ‘mashes …’: ‘The Whole of it came not at once—’ (c. late 1862). J762/Fr485. Similar to ‘stuns you by degrees’ in ‘He fumbles at your Soul’, op. cit.
117 ‘straighten’; ‘bubble Cool’: ‘He fumbles at your Soul’, op. cit.
117 ‘Assassin’; ‘borrows a Revolver’: ‘One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted —’ (c. 1862). J670/Fr407. (This scene is from a version of c. early 1864, sent to Sue.) A line quoted above, at the close of ch. 4, ‘Ourself behind ourself, concealed’, is from this poem. The haunted house, the divided self, and the confrontation are uncannily like Henry James’s psychological ghost tale, ‘The Jolly Corner’, a story T. S. Eliot later related to his hero’s haunted self in The Family Reunion.
117 poems that recount the … stages: See Vendler, 67, on the and thens of a torturer’s chamber.
118 ‘The Maddest …’: ‘It struck me — every Day —’ (c. 1863). J362/Fr636.
118 ‘Fog’: ‘There is a Languor of the Life’ (c. summer 1863). J396/Fr552.
118 ‘Languor’: Ibid.
118 ‘the Hour of Lead’: ‘After great pain’ (c. autumn 1862). J341/Fr372. Also ‘Boots of Lead’ creak over the Soul in the brain’s funeral. Fr340.
118 understanding of epilepsy: Temkin, The Falling Sickness (1945, rev. 1971), ix: ‘There is no unanimity about the range of the concept of epilepsy, and the nature of the disease is still obscure.’ Sieveking, On Epilepsy (1858), notes that the nineteenth-century advances in physiology were not matched by understanding of the nervous system.
118 Dr Holmes on epilepsy: Medical Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 192.
118 Julius Caesar:
118 ‘epilepsy’ in Othello: IV:i.
118 ‘the throe of Othello’: (20 June 1877). L506.
119 ‘reticent’: ‘The reticent volcano’ (transcribed by MLT). J1748/ Fr1776.
119 ‘when upon a pain Titanic …’: ‘I have never seen “Volcanoes” —’ (c. 1860). J175/Fr165.
119 ‘gunshot’; ‘spasmodic throes’ etc: Sieveking at the time in On Epilepsy, 4, 74, 108–9.
119 Jackson not to be consulted for anything trivial: To her brother ED mentioned a trouble she and her sister shared. I agree with Dr Norbert Hirschhorn (‘Was It Tuberculosis?’, New England Quarterly, 1999) that this was a blind. Lavinia was physically robust. Habegger, 262, suggests it was LD alone who (according to her diary) ‘called at Dr Jackson’s’ but it’s more likely that she accompanied her frailer sister.
119 Letters to a Young Physician: See 60–7, 85, 211, 229.
120 advice not to remove: Jackson, Another Letter, 116.
120 ‘idiot medications’: Oliver Wendell Holmes, student notes from Jackson’s medical lectures (1833).
120 ‘liability to the epileptic paroxysm’: Jackson, Another Letter, 48–9.
120 ‘dreadful’: Ibid., 49.
120 tastes should be indulged: Ibid., 83.
120 Patients ready to be brave: James Jackson Putnam, Memoirs of James Jackson (1905).
121 Dr Jackson and ED’s way of life: This suggestion came from Siamon Gordon. Henry James imagines something similar, the lift the truth (that she’s incurable) gives to Milly Theale, whose wise doctor opens up to her certain possibilities for living in The Wings of the Dove.
121 delivered the prescription to her father: (7 Oct 1851). L55. ‘Father has the recipe.’
121 ‘I have tried …’: Ibid.
121 prescription survives: pinned to L148, to WAD (27 Dec 1853). Reproduced in Home, 332. Editors Johnson and Ward add note about ‘a simple skin lotion, prescribed even today for rough or chapped hands’.
121 glycerine as treatment for epilepsy: ‘Medicinal Uses of Glycerine in the 19th Century’, TS in Health and Medicine folder, Jones Library, derived from Health at Home or Hall’s Family Doctor by William Whitty Hall (Hartford, CT: James Betts and Company, 1874).
122 Hirschhorn on prescription for glycerine: ‘Was It Tuberculosis?’, New England Quarterly, 72/1 (1999), 110–11.
122 ‘unsanitary’: Sieveking, 245.
123 ‘consolation …’: Jackson, Another Letter, 92.
123 ‘Somebody …’: (c. spring 1861). J158 / Fr222.
123 epilepsy often misdiagnosed: The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong’s autobiography, reveals that the nuns in her convent blame her for exhibitionism since doctors find nothing the matter.
124 ‘Struck, was I…’: (c. early 1864). J925/Fr841.
124 ‘I like a look of Agony’: (c. summer 1862). J241/Fr339.
124 ‘Torrid Noons’: ‘The fartherst Thunder’ (c. 1884). J1581/Fr1665. The ‘Missiles’ of ‘torrid Noons’ were sent to SHD in L914.
125 ‘It dont sound so terrible …’: (c. autumn 1862). J426/Fr384. Miller, ED: A Poet’s Grammar, 78–82, offers a sensitive analysis of poems that absent any reference for ‘it’. Miller picks out ‘It was not Death, for I stood up’ as a poem which attempts to ‘mark the boundaries’ of ‘an unnamed, powerful event’ and ‘circles its central theme, the identity of “it”’.
125 ‘I fit for them — I seek the Dark …’: (c. 1866). J1109/Fr1129. Apart from her, doctors alone use this verbal construction. ED must have sent this to SHD because it was published with SHD’s cache, The Single Hound, 1914.
125 grammar undergoing transformation: an illuminating analysis in Miller, ED: A Poet’s Grammar.
125 to ‘do’: ‘A still — Volcano — Life’. J601/Fr517.
125 ‘a purer food’; ‘transport …’: ‘I fit for them’, op. cit.
126 ‘While we were fearing …’: (c. 1874). J1277/Fr1317.
126 consultation with Dr Williams: Information in ED’s letters, Leyda, Hirschhorn and A & M.
126 eye-wash: Adams Drugstore, Amherst, Prescription records 1882–5. AC. The prescription is for ‘Dickinson’; a likelihood but no guarantee this is ED.
126 ‘Bereaved of all …’; ‘Cups …’; ‘I waked …’: (c. early 1864). J784/Fr886.
127 address of Dr Williams’s consulting room: Habegger, 484. The house no longer exists. The site is between Commonwealth Avenue and Newbury Street, across the road from the public gardens. Later the site of Ritz-Carlton Hotel, now part of TAJ hotel chain.
127 scotoma: noted by Jackson, Letters to a Young Physician.
127 ‘like so many sphinxes’: Charcot, Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux faites à la Salpétriérel. Cited by Porter, 546–7.
127 ophthalmoscope newly in use for searching out diseases of the brain: Porter, 506.
127 ‘hyperaesthesia of the retina’: In his textbooks Dr Williams steers clear of epilepsy. Too mysterious for his factual manner.
127 photo-sensitivity: Dr Williams’ textbook, The Diagnosis and Treatment of the Diseases of the Eye, notes that hyperaesthesia of the eye occurs in delicate subjects, marked by photophobia, neuralgia and seeing luminous spots of different colours. Vision is unimpaired. Avoidance of the glare of light from snow, together with little use of the eyes, can be effectual. In women, he says, there are cases of intense photophobia. One treatment is to be away from home. In ‘hysterical hyperaesthesia’ women are said to complain of persistent images on the retina and discomfort from light. The tone is misogynist, as though this were women’s nonsense. He does not consider if there could be a physical cause.
128 ‘forget the color of the Day’: ‘Severer Service of myself’ (c. early 1864). J786/Fr887.
128 ‘glittering Retinue …’; ‘put a Head away’; ‘No Drug for Consciousness’; ‘Affliction’; ‘Being’s Malady’: Ibid. Habegger, 485, picks up the aural nuance of ‘glittering Retinue’.
128 ‘Before I got my eye put out’: (c. summer 1862). J327/Fr336. I quote the first version sent to TWH because the capitals are more revealing.
129 doctor wipes her cheeks: To SHD. L292.
129 ‘Perception …’: (c. 1865). J1071/Fr 1103.
129 Coleridge: Biographia Literaria (1815–16), ch. 13: ‘On the Imagination’.
130 ‘Emily wants to be well’: L293.
130 ‘Down thoughts’: To Loo. L290.
130 ‘Siberia’: L290. In Fr994 (c. 1865) it feels to the speaker as if ‘the mind were going blind—’.
130 Alice James on doctors: The Diary of Alice James (27 Sept 1890). Penguin classics, 142. Showalter, The Female Malady, 144.
131 ‘hystero-epilepsy’: This supposed condition was thought to be connected with menstruation (D. F. Scott, The History of Epileptic Theory). There is a suggestive article on the subject in a standard medical dictionary owned by Dr Bigelow of Amherst who treated the Dickinsons in the 1880s, now in Jones Library. See also Temkin, 370, and Showalter, The Female Malady, 150.
131 ‘It struck me’: (c. 1863). J362/Fr636.
132 intermarriage: Letter from Gilbert Montague to ALH about MDB seeking information about their families. He refers also to intermarriage with the Gilberts. Houghton: bMS Am 1923 (14).
132 Zebina’s paralysis: No corroborating evidence. According to Sieveking, 29, the left side can be paralysed during a fit, and in rare cases this can be permanent.
133 ‘Poor Harriet and Zebina’: L279.
133 caller’s report of Ned’s fit: Elizabeth T. Seeyle to her husband Julius Seeyle (11 Feb 1877), who was College President. Seelye Papers, AC: box 5, folder 13.
133 rheumatic fever: Home, 466. Called here inflammatory rheumatism.
134 ‘crumb’: (c. late May 1877). L501.
134 ‘scintillation’: To Mrs Holland (c. early 1877). L491.
134 Mattie and WAD ashamed of each other: L492.
135 MLT on epilepsy and WAD’s nervous make-up: Journals, V (18 Oct 1891), 98–9. Yale.
135 broken crockery: Reported to MLT when she was preparing the first edition of ED’s letters (1894).
136 ‘Loaded Gun’: op. cit.
136 ‘power to kill’: Benfey, Hummingbirds, notes the source in Byron, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, a poem to which ED alludes in her ‘Master’ letters.
6: TELLING
137 ‘rearrange’; ‘Amputate …’; ‘bandaged’: ‘Rearrange a “Wife’s” Affection!’ (c. late 1861). J1737/Fr267.
138 ‘as Firmament to Fin’: L265.
138 ‘’Tis so appalling …’: (c. summer 1862). J281/Fr341.
138 Men dying ‘externally’ etc: ‘We dream — it is good we are dreaming’ (c. summer 1863). J531/Fr584. This poem is discussed by Miller, A Poet’s Grammar, 80. I’m indebted to Linn Cary Mehta for an observation that ED wrote more death poems during the Civil War.
139 ‘perfectness’; ‘situates’: ‘Perception of an Object costs’, op. cit: ch. 5.
139 ‘surge’ in the brain: Philip Davis, ‘The Shakespeared Brain’, Literary Review (July 2008).
139 John Adams and ED: Thanks to music critic Philip Clark for playing Harmonium.
139 Adams’s objective treatment of ED: I owe this again to Philip Clark.
139 pop stars: M. Ward, for one (in Post-War); the Italian Carla Bruni, for another. The latter’s album released in 2007 included adaptations of ED, Yeats and Auden, sung ‘in a smoky, quivering English accent’. M. Ward is one of the singer-songwriters discussed by Laura Barton in ‘This be the verse’, Guardian (13 Oct 2006). Portrait of Bruni’s pop career (before marrying the French premier Sarkozy) in the London Times (19 Dec 2007).
139 Doherty nicking ED and Dostoyevsky: ‘Emily Dickinson? She’s hardcore’, interview with Laura Barton, Guardian (3 Oct 2006).
140 ‘I took one Draught of Life …’: J1725/Fr396.
140 ED resented editorial interference: ‘The Snake’, she said, was robbed of her.
140 poems provisional, with continued alterations in booklets: Wineapple, White Heat, 74.
141 a persuasive case: EDC as part of the Dickinson Electronic Archives. Led by Martha Nell Smith, the Dickinson Editing Collective has an ongoing project to publish thirty of ED’s MSS (together with transcription and commentary) on the internet. The idea is to eliminate editorial interventions between ED and her readers.
141 ‘Caxton killed Anon’: ‘Anon’, ed. Brenda Silver, in the Virginia Woolf issue of Twentieth Century Literature (fall/winter 1979).
141 ‘… some trace of her’: The Cottesloe at the National Theatre, London (Oct 2008).
141 alternative to publication: Martha Nell Smith, Rowing in Eden. See too Petrino, 20.
142 ‘Publication … is the Auction …’: (c. late 1863). J709/Fr788.
143 ‘donkeys’: LL, 81. ‘Donkeys, Davy,’ she said, alluding to David Copperfield where David’s eccentric aunt Betsy Trotwood gives this alarm when donkeys stray into her garden.
143 ‘The Soul selects …’: op. cit.
143 ‘Rare …’; ‘sovreign People’: (c. 1865). L336/Fr893.
143 ‘altitude of me —’: ‘’Twas just this time …’ (c. summer 1862). J445/Fr344.
143 ‘Mine … White Election!’: J528/Fr411.
144 ‘Igrope’: To SB (early summer 1862). L266.
144 SHD and Peruvian mines: (c. 1862). L258.
144 Bowles and North African mines: (c. 1875). L438: ‘your Numidian Haunts’. At the time of the Roman Republic, the province of Numidia stretched across present-day Algeria and Tunisia. Cited by Farr, 188, as amongst ED’s erotic metaphors.
144 ‘I have lost a Sister …’: L395.
144 ‘a hedge away’: See poem celebrating SHD’s birthday, end ch. 3.
144 ‘own a Susan of my own’: L531 is a letter-poem sent to SHD and signed ‘Emily’. Fr1436. Farr, 128, surmises that ED’s phrase was only a gesture of acknowledgement of their amorous past.
145 Sue as stranger: (c. 1877). L530.
145 so the story goes: Remembered by Gertrude Graves, ‘A Cousin’s Memories of ED’, Boston Sunday Globe (12 Jan 1930). Cited by Johnson as note to L515.
145 ‘Your “Rascal”’: (c. 1877). L515.
145 ‘Are you — Nobody — too?’: (c. late 1861). J288/Fr260.
145 ‘We will preserve …’: L230.
146 ‘My heart …’ etc: (c. summer 1860). L220.
146 ‘Because I could not say it …’: ‘Through the strait pass of suffering’. L251/Fr187.
146 ‘mad’: To Mrs Holland (c. 20 Jan 1856). L182.
146 ‘few pleasures so deep …’: L265.
146 ‘wayward’; ‘I had no Monarch …’: L271.
147 ‘I went to school …’: L261.
147 ‘pumsh’: Houghton: *65M —121.
147 ‘Sweetest of Renowns …’: (c. spring 1876). L458.
148 ‘plaintive’: TWH’s word. Editor’s note to L274.
148 ‘Did I displease …’: L274.
148 ‘Will you instruct …’: (c. 1873). L396.
148 ‘Dare you …’: Ch. 3, op. cit.
148 Higginson to ED: DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95. Signature cut out in the ms has been restored. L330a (minus date).
149 ‘partially cracked …’: Editor’s note to L481.
149 ED to Chickering: (early 1883). L798.
149 ‘unsuitable’; ‘too ethereal’: ED’s schoolmate Emily Fowler Ford’s account of a conversation with Dr Holland in ED, Letters (1931), 131. (Emily Ford was herself the author of two volumes of verse. She disparaged ED, calling her poems ‘air-plants’ with ‘no roots in the earth’. She judged that ‘these lyrical ejaculations, these breathed out projectiles, sharp as lances’ would, if published, fall on idle ears.)
150 Dr Holland’s belittling attitudes to women: I owe these details to Habegger, 383, who discovered Holland’s revealing unsigned essay, ‘Women in Literature’ (1858).
150 ‘out of gear’: (c. 20 Jan 1856). L182.
150 ‘I was sick, little sister …’: L385.
150 SHD and ‘sick Days’: L383, 384.
150 no golden fleece, and Jason a sham: ‘Finding is the first Act’ (c. early 1865). J870/Fr910.
150 ‘because they talk …’: L271.
150 ‘drained’: TWH to his wife. L342b.
151 ‘abnormal’: TWH recalled the interview twenty years later, Atlantic Monthly, lxviii (Oct 1891), 453.
151 ‘Infinity’: From ‘Show me Eternity’ (c. 1884). L830/Fr1658.
151 ‘Only Woman …’: (c. 1875). L447.
151 twice the number: she sent SHD 276 poems.
152 ‘Safe …’: For history of the drafts, see Elizabeth A. Petrino, ch. entitled ‘Alabaster Chambers’. ED wrote two more endings for the poem.
152 SHD’s note on ‘Safe’ to ED: DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95. In note to L238.
152 ‘I shall not murmur’: J1410/Fr1429.
153 SHD’s rarity: Recalling ‘Rare to the Rare’ in ch. 3, op. cit. L336, a poem-letter.
153 ‘To see you …’: L346.
153 ‘Egypt …’: L430. Antony and Cleopatra, III: xi, 56–61.
153 Helen Fiske in Amherst: see ch. 1.
153 Helen Hunt: Kate Phillips, 141–7, 308–9.
155 ‘The Birds begun at Four o’clock’: (c. 1863). J783/Fr504.
7: ROMANCING JUDGE LORD
156 ‘Dear Family’: DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
156 Edward Dickinson’s funeral: Springfield Daily Republican and funeral sermon. Copies in DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
157 text from Samuel: 1 Sam 20:1.
157 ‘melted to tears’: funeral sermon, quoting letter to the Revd Mr Colton who had brought on the conversion of the group of seventy in 1850, including SHD.
157 ‘I would like it to not end’: L418.
157 ‘I say unto you’: L432.
157 ‘a House of Snow’: Ibid.
157 Mr Dickinson and the birds: L644.
157 ‘Palace’: ‘From his slim Palace in the Dust’. J1300/Fr1339.
157 ‘Marl House’: (c. Jan 1875). L432.
157 ‘He giveth …’: Psalms 147, v.9. Allusion in L668.
158 ‘spectacular …’: L696.
158 ‘George Who — ?’: ‘That sums all Politics to me’ (late autumn 1884). L950.
158 LD more hurried: L667.
158 Tenderness: ‘the only God I know’. L689.
158 hands-on care: ED’s list of what she did does not include the hands-on nursing. L668.
158 the sisters’ bond: (c. 1873). L391.
158 royal purple: MTB’s ‘Biographical Notes’ in Home, 486–7.
158 court martial: ED, Letters, ed. MLT (1931), 175.
158 ‘Eagles’: MTB’s ‘Biographical Notes’ in Home, 486–7.
158 ‘Aunt Glegg’: L650.
159 ‘the dear Lords’: L392.
159 enquire: Letters to LD (c. 1875–7), DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
159 granddaughter: Theodora Ward, Harvard Library Bulletin, 98. Ward edited the letters ED sent to her grandparents, and assisted Johnson’s edition of the collected letters.
160 Benfey: A Summer of Hummingbirds, 206.
160 ‘Profile of a Tree …’: L645. Fragment with no name attached that was amongst the Lord material. Photograph in Werner, Open Folios.
160 ED’s letters to Lord: Drafts amongst her papers, some fragments, some in pencil, some fair copies. It can’t be assumed with certainty that she sent them in exactly this form as part of their weekly correspondence. One of ED’s drafts was in an envelope addressed in Lord’s hand to Vinnie and sent via Austin’s law office. Presumably Lord’s sister-in-law and niece, who deplored the tie with ED, destroyed ED’s letters after Lord’s death. Lord’s letters to ED were also presumably destroyed along with those of other correspondents. Werner, 47, ‘unedits’ fragments and drafts, and questions the status Johnson gave them as letters. It’s uncertain how MLT came to have this collection, which includes a few fragments that don’t obviously apply to Lord. Werner, stressing textual instability, looks at words as an aesthetic construct on the page. This tends to deflect their specified erotic charge. There is, however, too much circumstantial evidence to fade out ED’s attachment to Judge Lord. Critics who foreground what was undoubtedly an intense tie to Susan are tempted to minimise her attractions to men. In my view she was susceptible to both sexes but with a verbal excitement and abandon that eludes current categories.
160 Abbie Farley: Twenty years later she married William C. West from a leading Salem family.
160 will of Otis P. Lord: AC: MSS 761aa-bb, box 9.
160 ‘Little hussy’: Recalled by Mrs Miriam Stockton, the chief heir of Abbie Farley West (died 1932), talking to MTB in 1936. ED: A Revelation, 23.
160 SHG’s warning against ED to MLT: Note to L757. Source in MLT, ‘Scurrilous but True’ (1932), quoted in Sewall, i, 195. Quoted by MTB, Revelation, 59,
161 ‘Fumigation …’: L1041.
161 ‘merciless’; ‘dynamite …’: ‘In Memory of Otis P. Lord’ (1884) by the Bar of the Commonwealth and of the Supreme Court at Boston. AC, box 9, f.53.
161 ‘the secret springs of action’; ‘he that becomes master …’: The Hon Asahel Huntington Memorial Address to the Essex Institute, Salem (5 Sept 1871). Cited in ED: A Revelation, 44–6.
161 ‘a perfect figure-head …’: ‘Annals of Evergreens’ (1892).
162 ED’s courtroom language: (c. 1878). L559.
162 ‘hunger’; ‘Dont you know …’ etc: (c. 1878). L562
162 ‘does Judge Lord belong to the Church?’; ‘I had never tried …’: (c. 1878). L560.
163 ‘I fear I must ask …’; ‘Should you ask …’: (Oct 1879). L619.
163 ‘little devices …’; ‘glee’; ‘How fleet…’: (c. 1881). L695/J1513/Fr1557.
163 ‘sweet Salem’: L751.
164 ‘How could I …’: L645.
164 intensified in late summer 1880: Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds, 206.
164 ‘your distant hope’; ‘heavenly hour’; ‘unvail’: L645.
164 ‘I have done with guises’: L559.
165 ‘fair home’: L645.
165 racy talk: Obituary recollections by colleagues on the bench. AC. MSS 761aa-bb, box 9.
165 ‘I will not wash …’ etc: (1880). L645.
165 prison-house: Wordsworth, ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality’.
165 ‘Ethiop within’: ‘More Life — went out — when He went’ (c. autumn 1862). J422/Fr415.
165 ‘Cobweb attitudes’; ‘such was not …’: ‘To hang our head — ostensibly —’ (c. 1859). Fr160/J105.
165 The Belle of Amherst: By William Booth Luce, with Julie Harris in the role of ED.
165 spoof of ED legend in Being John Malkovich: Noted by Daniel Karlin, reviewing Fr (1999).
165 Joyce Carol Oates, ‘EDickinson RepliLuxe’: Wild Nights! Thanks to novelist Sheila Kohler for the gift.
166 extraordinarily frank in its strange allusiveness and innuendo: Comment by Isobel Dixon.
166 ‘… To write to you …’: L750.
166 ‘impregnable chances …’: L750. See also L749, where it has a differently ambiguous connotation in a letter to the Boston editor, Niles, where the question of publication has come up.
167 ‘Papa …’: L750.
167 ‘Emily Jumbo’: (c. Nov 1882). L780.
167 Jumbo in the circus: Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds, 217.
167 ‘I will try …’; ‘dear Home’; ‘So delicate …’; ‘tender Priest..’; ‘a treasure …’; ‘While others …’: (3 Dec 1882). L790.
168 ‘the cause’: L691.
168 ‘would be right’: It’s the moral language of Strether, the New England hero of Henry James, as he backs away from commitment to a congenial partner, Maria Gostrey. The situation is not entirely clear: why is it not ‘right’? The closing scene of The Ambassadors.
168 ‘Fire rocks’: J1677/Fr1743, op. cit.
168 bridegroom: See ch. 4, above.
169 Middlemarch’s ‘glory’: (c. Apr 1873). L389.
169 ‘the Lane to the Indes …’: To SHD (c. Mar 1876). L456.
169 ‘like a vulture’: L962. Cross’s Life was published in 1885.
169 stories of the Wilder and Loomis ancestry: MLT, unfinished TS autobiography. Yale: box 116, f.452.
171 Thoreau invited Loomis to the Maine Woods: Letters from Thoreau to Loomis were discovered belatedly. Yale: box 46, f.9.
171 ‘Richard Coeur de Lion’: MLT, unfinished TS autobiography. Yale: box 116, f. 452. I’m guessing here that MLT had this from her mother.
172 story based on her younger self: ‘Friendly Enemies’: (1889). Yale: box 77, f.310. She wrote this story when she returned to the Boston Conservatory for further training in 1889–90.
173 DPT’s bent for gadgetry: Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds, 181.
174 ‘a strong intuition’ etc: Journals, cited A & M, 51.
175 ‘climax …’: Journals. Yale: microfilm, reel 8.
176 ‘give up everything …’: Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904), ch. 27.
176 Todds’ private life at Amherst House: MLT, Journals, III (1881). Yale: microfilm.
176 ‘At first I used to suffer …’: Journal (Feb 1890). Yale: microfilm. Cited A & M, 50.
176 ‘absolutely blind …’: Cited A & M, 51.
177 WAD ‘could be forever trusted’: MLT, Journals (15 Sept 1882). Yale: microfilm, reel 8.
177 ‘I have simply felt …’; ‘innocent’; ‘caged eagle’: A & M, 58.
178 Millicent’s first encounters with Amherst and ‘Gildud’: MLT’s fragmentary biography of MTB which is really more an autobiography. TS. Yale.
178 ‘I have not the quality of motherhood …’: ‘Millicent’s Life’.
179 MLT’s exchange with Ned: MLT, Journals, III (2 Mar 1882), 161. Yale: microfilm.
181 ‘Cynic …’: L689.
181 ‘thrown open …’: A & M, 135.
181 ‘Why should I …’: WAD to MLT (c. Nov 1882). A & M, 134
181 ‘the most delicate courtesy’: MLT, Journals, V (16 Dec 1885). Yale: microfilm, reel 8.
182 LD’s imitations: ‘Annals of The Evergreens’.
183 Gib born: (1 August 1875).
183 ‘Our’ child: L1018.
183 ‘panting with secrets’: L868.
183 ‘Weren’t you chasing Pussy?’: L664.
183 ‘Tudor …’: To SHD. L938.
184 ‘Oh I love you …’; ‘It was no fault …’ etc: A & M, 138.
184 ‘The evening …’ etc: A & M, 149 (8 Jan 1883).
184 ‘cruel’ etc: A & M, 149 (8 Jan 1883).
185 ‘feeling of wrath’: A & M, 152 (28 Jan 1883).
185 ‘I trust you …’: A & M, 156.
185 ‘famished …’: A & M, 154.
186 winter use of the dining room at the Homestead: I’m grateful to Jane Wald, curator of the Emily Dickinson Museum, for this information.
187 tryst: On that occasion, DPT was there.
187 ‘she had come to stay’: A & M, 143 (15 Dec 1882).
187 ‘I have come to stay’: A & M, 151.
187 ‘As I told you … come to stay’: Third repetition not included in A & M. MLT letters to WAD. Yale.
187 ‘I came to stay’: A & M, 160 (25 Apr 1883).
187 gift of arbutus; ‘I am sorry …’; ‘This week …’: A & M, 160–1.
188 WAD on meeting MLT in Boston: WAD to MLT (12 July 1883). A & M, 165. Sewall, i, 179.
189 ‘I suffer …’: A & M, 166.
189 LD’s letter: A & M, 160–1.
189 ‘shine & affection’; ‘I shall sing …’: LD to MLT (n.d. and ‘12 July’). Yale.
190 ‘I thank God …’; ‘Yes, darling’; ‘before the veil..’; ‘white heat…’: A & M, 171–3.
191 WAD’s letters to David Todd: Yale: 496C, series VII, box 97.
191 ‘than all the Trustees …’: Interviewed by MTB. Yale. Cited by Sewall, i, appendix II, 294.
192 ‘sweetly unmoral’: Journals (1911). MLT acknowledged her disappointment in the marriage only decades later, as something she was too proud to discuss even in her journal where her usual mode was ‘blue sky’.
192 ‘Black Moghul’: A & M.
192 ‘Perhaps the dear, grieved Heart …’: L869.
192 ‘has not leave to last’; boats: L871.
193 ‘My life as a sort of consecration …’: Quoted in A & M, 173.
III: MABEL’S REIGN
9: EMILY’S STAND
197 ‘Never eaqualled’: WAD’s diary (17 Nov 1884). Yale: box 101, f.245.
197 ‘most perfect …’: WAD’s diary (Sun, 14 Oct 1888). Yale: box 102, f.251.
197 records of lovemaking: Diaries at Yale. Discussed in A & M, 180, and Peter Gay, Education of the Senses, 461–2, where Gay finds that MLT used ‘o’ for orgasm after a progressive number during the year, e.g. on 28 Apr 1881 she notes: ‘Happiest of nights with David — my own. 15 (o)’. On 22 Sept 1882, soon after the Rubicon moment with WAD, she was in Washington with DPT and notes numbers 40 and 41.
197 ‘at the other house …’: WAD’s diary (1886), Yale: box 102, f.247.
197 ‘A most … two hours’: MLT’s diary (1886). Yale: microfilm, reel 1.
198 ‘we met …’: Letter (6 Aug 1885). A & M, 235–6. WAD’s diary for Thursday 7 August 1884 corroborates this: ‘at the other house pm till 4 _ = = = = and then at office’. An uninterpretable M-like mark above the parallel lines.
199 ‘all will be well’: (29 Dec 1883). A & M, 178.
199 ‘Conventionalism …’: (early 1884). A & M, 186.
199 ‘dream …’: a poem entitled ‘P.S. First’ (c. 1883).
200 Maggie’s witness: Deposition before a trial of 1898. See below, ch. 12.
200 ‘Such superhuman …’: Letter to his sister at school (Mar 1885). A & M, 202.
200 ‘talk you over …’: (12 July 1885). Yale.
201 second writing table: Longsworth, The World of ED, 84.
202 door closed: Maher’s deposition before the 1898 trial.
203 ‘snare …’: L736.
204 ‘Trophy is a snare’: (late Sept 1882, the same month as MLT’s singing). L769.
204 ‘entangled Antony’: (21 Mar 1885). L978.
205 ‘Will Brother and Sister’s dear friend …’: (c. 1883). L831.
205 ‘America’: (summer 1885). L1004.
206 ‘adder’s tongue …’: MLT’s diary (8 May 1885). Yale: microfilm.
206 ‘Their dappled importunity’: (c. 1885). Fr1677. Franklin’s note about the MS links it with the diary entry above.
207 ‘You are a great poet’: L444a.
207 ‘like a great ox …’: L476c.
207 ‘You say …’: L476c.
207 A Masque of Poets: Copy in PML: 42123, location: E-387E.
207 ‘I will copy …’: (29 Apr 1878, from her home in Colorado Springs). L573a.
207 ‘Success is counted sweetest’: (c. 1859). J67/Fr112/EDC.
207 ‘Now …’: (25 Oct 1878). L573b.
208 ‘she wished …’: L749b.
209 ‘efface’: L814.
209 ‘I thank you …’: L813b.
209 sample poems: Including ‘The Wind begun to rock the Grass’ and ‘Ample make this Bed’.
209 Niles’s rejection of ED: L814a.
210 dull: John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father (NY: Norton, 2007), 335. According to biographer Susan Cheever (in conversation), Alcott herself thought it dull, resistant as she was to writing for children.
210 HH and the Native Americans: Susan L. Mizruchi, Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. iii, 549–52; Showalter, A Jury of Peers, 200–3; and Loeffelholz, From School to Salon, 131–61.
211 ‘What portfolios …’: L937a.
211 ‘I hope …’; ‘tender permission’: (c. early 1878). MLT omitted these lines in her 1894 edition of ED’s letters and Johnson printed this less interesting truncated version in L537 and L591. Houghton: MS Am 111.10 (4). The MSS were lost then rediscovered amongst the Houghton collection.
211 ‘light a world’: ED to Whitney (c. autumn 1884). Cut as above from L948. MS rediscovered.
212 ‘phosphorescence’: SHD quoted this. Amongst her section of DFP, Houghton bMS Am 1118.95, recording an oral remark of ED’s to Ned (7 Mar 1883).
212 LD heard; ‘Emily …’: L752. ED reports this exchange verbatim to Lord (14 May 1882).
213 ‘rapture’; ‘return’ etc: L752.
214 ‘Still own thee’: (c. early 1884). J1633/Fr1654. Not published until 1945.
214 ‘A caller comes’: L967.
214 ‘dart’; ‘anguish …’: L891.
214 ‘place of shafts’: L892.
214 ‘Abyss has no Biographer—’: L899, op. cit., Part I.
214 ‘My heart …’: Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. ED didn’t specify this line when she referred to this oration, but it’s the most apt.
214 ‘waylaying Light’: L937.
214 ‘When Jesus …’: L932.
215 interiors of the Lessey house: photographs in the Todd collection, Yale.
215 ‘a great darkness coming’: (early Aug 1884, looking back to 14 June). L907.
217 ‘The little boy …’: L907.
217 ‘The going from a world we know’: (early Aug 1884). J1603/Fr1662/L907. From destroyed letter to Loo and Fanny about her illness. Copied by Fanny for MLT’s selection of Letters (1894). The punctuation would have been regularised, and Fanny would have edited out anything too revealing.
217 ‘Show me Eternity’: (c. 1884). Follows letter signed ‘Sister’. L912/Fr1658.
217 ‘No Words ripple …’: L913.
217 cardinal flower: L909.
218 ‘Go to Mine …’; ‘No vacillating God’; ‘Remember…’: L908.
218 ‘Dart’ of enemy spear: A code word for death elsewhere in ED’s poetry.
218 ‘adjourning Heart’: When Hawthorne asks which is the most contaminating of sins, it turns out to be an adjourning heart: removing or withholding the self from family or community. Chillingworth, Dimmesdale, Young Goodman Brown, Ethan Brand and the Puritan minister who assumes a black veil through which he looks on the woman who was to be his wife — all are guilty of breaking their ties with ‘the human heart’.
219 Nellie Sweetser: L916. Cornelia Peck had married Howard Sweetser in 1860. The Sweetser family lived on a large plot behind that of the Homestead, and socially they were on a par.
219 ‘trust’; ‘Right’: L953.
219 ‘a sneak …’: WAD to MLT (c. 25 Oct 1884). A & M, 199.
219 ‘vulgar minded people’: WAD to MLT (c. 10 Oct 1884). A & M, 197.
220 WAD to Mrs Loomis: (n.d.). Yale: MLT Papers, box 97, f.155.
220 ‘There is nothing …’: (c. 25 Oct 1884). A & M, 199.
220 ‘Parting … reluctantly’: L946.
221 ‘The Dyings …’: (autumn 1884). L939.
221 rows: DPT’s recollection, MTB, ‘Notes taken during the talk with my father’ (1927). Yale: box 47, f.14. Cited by Sewall, i, appendix II.
221 wallpaper incident: Ned to ‘Mopsy’, his sister Mattie who was at Miss Porter’s school in Farmington, Connecticut (26 Jan [1885]), marked ‘am’). Hay Library, Brown University, Providence: St Armand Collection: 33.
221 ‘wild’; ‘cruelty …’ etc: Ibid. St A: 34. The time is noted: ‘11.15’ p.m.
222 ‘most forlorn …’: To MDB (29 Jan 1885). Ibid. St A: 35.
222 ‘gasps out’; ‘the Cripples’: Ned to Frothingham (3 Mar 1885). St Armand, New England Quarterly (1988), 373.
222 ‘Little dud David’: DPT’s recollection, MTB, ‘Notes taken during the talk with my father’ (1927). Yale: box 47, f.14. Cited by Sewall, i, appendix II, section 5. Sewall cites a later date, Sept—Oct 1933, which is the date MTB gives when she types the interview finally in the years before her death. It looks as though MTB started interviewing her father during that critical year for her when she began receiving psychotherapy.
222 ‘strange relation’; ‘more remarkable …’ etc: Journals. Yale: microfilm, reel 8.
223 four-way: A & M, 203.
223 ‘cynical, carping …’: MLT, Journals, IV (July 1885), 102. Yale: microfilm.
223 ‘I kiss you …’: (3 July 1885). A & M, 220.
223 ‘when it comes right’: WAD to MLT (7 June, the day after she sailed, 1885). A & M, 208.
223 ‘kiss you & caress …’ and — and then …’: To DPT (9 Aug 1885) and to WAD (18 Aug 1885). A & M, 239.
224 ‘Dear heart …’: MLT to WAD from Lucerne (3 Aug 1885). A & M, 232.
224 ‘Dear Boy’: L1000.
225 ED’s refusal to sign the deed: Evident when DPT was cross-questioned in a trial over MLT’s claim on Dickinson land twelve years later. Under pressure he admitted that the Todds had not bought their plot (as Mabel gave out), but had it deeded to them as a gift ‘after Miss Emily died’. See ch. 13, below.
225 ‘You will look after Mother?’: L999.
225 ‘Why should we censure Othello …’: L1016. Dated by MLT, and included in her first selection of ED letters, 1894.
226 ‘client’ note: Yale: 496C, box 94.
226 ‘I will come …’: Yale. Not in A & M.
226 ‘Thistles’: L1033. Matthew 7.16.
227 ‘The tie between us …’: (c. late 1885). L1024.
227 ‘Emerging …’: Ibid.
227 ‘solace’: (c. early 1886). L1029 and L1030.
227 ‘Because I would not stop for Death’: (c. late 1862). J712/Fr479.
227 ‘the great intrusion of Death’: (autumn 1884). L940.
227 ‘I do not think …’: L668.
227 drugstore record of prescriptions: Several other Dickinsons lived in the vicinity, and I’ve inferred that the patient who appears most frequently and is called simply ‘Dickinson’ or ‘Miss Dickinson’ is ED, since all other Dickinsons are indicated by full name, ‘Mrs’, or initials.
227 Dr Bigelow’s copy of Dictionary of Medicine: Jones Library, Amherst.
228 MLT in black in the church choir: Diary (16 May 1886). Yale: microfilm, reel 1.
228 ‘utterly’; ‘cried frantically’: MLT, diary (18 May 1886). Yale: microfilm, reel 1.
228 MLT perceptive and prescient: Comment by Lennie Goodings at Virago.
228 Poe’s tale: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’.
228 MLT in black and haggard: A neighbour, Mrs Jameson, noticed this.
228 ‘Don’t say a word’: (n.d.). A & M.
228 meadow: Described by MTB in her notes for an autobiography. Sewall, i, appendix II, 296.
228 Painted red: It was red with green trimmings. AB, 4. The house still stands, though it’s been moved in toto from the southern to the northern side of the street, the side nearer to the Homestead. The house is no longer visible from Main Street, surrounded now by mature trees, and the Dickinson meadow is filled with houses.
229 ‘a little house …’: Yale — one of the three TS mss in the Yale archive, synthesised by Sewall, i, ‘Scurrilous but True’, appendix II, 285.
229 ménage à trois: A & M, 242. Thanks to Keith Carradine for the alert.
229 ‘with the witness’: WAD’s diary (1886). Yale: box 102, f.247. Siamon Gordon noted his use of the legal word.
229 Mabel’s diary for 1886: Yale: microfilm, reel 1.
229 ‘more than any other man’: Interview with MTB (1927). Sewall, i, appendix II.
229 ‘a sort of unspoken sympathy’: MLT Papers (6 July 1885). Yale: 496C. Not in A & M.
229 ‘clear the track’: WAD to MLT (12 July 1886). A & M, 250.
229 DPT humming an aria: Peter Gay, 94.
229 outside stair: A & M, 242.
230 ‘awful omni-presence’; ‘the somewhat terrible center…’: A few fragments of autobiography (from massive collection). Yale. Transcribed by Sewall, i, appendix II, 297–8.
230 ‘the quaint little girl …’: (c. late Sept 1882). L769. MTB was then aged two. The date suggests that the child accompanied Mabel’s first visit to the Homestead, and that though ED did not appear to Mabel, she was face to face with the child.
230 tassels: ‘25 August 1927’, autobiographical TSS. Yale: box 56, f.6. After typing, MTB adds in pencil that someone must have told her this detail, i.e. she questions her memory, but the dangling, the bending to a small child who’s often about the house, rings true. Who could have told her? Mamma never saw ED.
10: LADY MACBETH OF AMHERST
231 ‘Mabel Loomis Dickinson’: Yale: 496E, series I, box 4, f.57. The envelope is undated.
231 ‘presentiment’: (2 Nov 1885). A & M, 244.
232 farewell letter: (5 June). Yale. Not in A & M.
232 An angel: (c. spring 1885). A & M, 204.
232 ‘pure white’: (14 June 1886). A & M, 247.
234 MLT’s report of what WAD told her of his marriage: Journals, V (16 Dec 1885). Yale. Also a summary on a strip of paper, preserved with her papers at Yale: 496C, series VII, box 103, f.259. The spider’s web cliché is repeated in both sources.
234 inscribed book: EDR.
234 ED’s exchange with Dr Holland: Quoted by ED to SHD. L714.
234 Sue’s visit to ED: ED to Dr Holland. L715.
235 ‘And you alone …’: (6 July 1885). Yale. Not in A & M.
235 ‘It seems unfair …’: (Feb 1883). A & M, 154.
235 MLT asked WAD for reasonsl: A & M, 185.
235 MLT in Washington: (early 1884). Ibid.
235 ‘to use as a shield’: WAD to MLT, repeating her plea. Ibid.
236 ‘a lady to the core’: (19 Aug 1887). A & M, 288.
236 Ned’s nerves: To MDB (1 Feb 1885). Hay Library. St Armand, New England Quarterly (1988), 373.
236 ‘storm-centre’; ‘stiffened up’: To MDB (11 Jan and 3 Mar 1885). Ibid.
236 ‘Is it not better …’: (early 1884). A & M, 186.
236 ‘my sweet wife’: A & M, 235.
237 ‘wicked’ etc: A & M, 240–1.
237 ‘encumbrances’, ‘annoyances’: (15 Dec 1885). A & M, 244–5.
237 ‘deprivations …’: (2 Nov 1885). A & M, 244.
237 ‘one turn of God’s hand’: (15 Dec 1885), op. cit.
237 ‘The World hath not known …’: (c. late 1885). L1024.
238 ‘You will not…’: A & M, 244–5.
238 ‘star of presentiment …’: (2 Nov 1885). A & M, 244.
238 potentially dangerous: Browning’s Porphyria (in the dramatic monologue ‘Porphyria’s Lover’) and Othello’s Desdemona are loved by men who kill them.
239 ‘divine possibilities …’: MLT to WAD (7 June 1887). Yale. Not in A & M.
239 ‘of-course feeling …’: (c. 10 June 1887). Yale. Not in A & M.
240 ‘unconscious’: Polly Longsworth, A & M, 286.
241 ‘morbid’; ‘hatred …’: A & M, 286–7.
241 ‘If any divine visitation …’: A & M, 290.
241 ‘my angel wife’: (18 June 1887), when she was en route for Japan. A & M, 270.
242 ‘There is nothing else …’: (16 July 1887). A & M, 280–1.
242 ‘the power’ of her love: A & M, 280.
242 Seelye not impressed with DPT: WAD to MLT (3 July 1887). A & M, 273–4.
242 ‘I am pitifully helpless …’: (31 July 1887). A & M, 286.
242 ‘turn it over’: A & M, 298.
243 ‘I want to rush away …’: (2 Nov 1885). A & M, 244.
243 ‘clearly’: (6 July 1885). Yale. Not in A & M.
243 hoggery …’: (13 Nov 1887). DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
244 ‘volume of Emerson …’: (16 Nov 1887), from Memphis, Tennessee. A & M, 300.
244 ‘frightened’: WAD to MLT (28 Mar 1888). A & M, 304.
245 SHD to WAD from Maine: (4 Aug 1888). DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
245 MLT’s appearance in 1888: MLT’s photo album. Yale: 496E.
245 ‘thunderbolt’; ‘I was crushed’: A & M, 310.
245 ‘that heavy incubus’ etc: Journals (22 Oct 1888), 33. Yale: microfilm.
246 ‘It almost seems to me …’: A & M, 310–12.
247 ‘heart-breaking discourtesies’: MLT to WAD (14 Apr 1889). A & M, 319.
247 MLT and the Handel and Haydn Society: Journals (winter 1990). Yale: microfilm.
247 MLT on her ‘dear men’: Journals, V, 44, 49. Yale: microfilm.
248 ‘face to face with … horror’: (30 Nov 1889). A & M, 328.
248 Mrs Coonley: A cousin of Eben Loomis.
249 ‘mentally and spiritually …’: (1890). A & M, 296.
249 ‘wonderful effect’: Journals, V (30 Nov 1890), 73. Yale: microfilm.
249 creative offspring: I’m indebted to poet and agent Isobel Dixon for this.
11: MABEL IN EXCELSIS
250 ‘my work …’: MDB, Introduction to Further Poems.
250 ‘A Damascus blade …’; ‘swift…’: Obituary, Springfield Republican (18 May 1886). Copy in AC.
251 SHD sent poem to Gilder: (31 Dec 1886). Century Collection, Manuscript Division of the New York Public Library, cited AB, 88.
251 ‘un-presentable’: SHD to TWH (c. 1890). AC: ED collection: Todd, 110–11.
251 ‘Alcohol’ and ‘pearl’: Cited by Benfey in ‘The Mystery of ED’, NYRB (1999).
251 ‘wayward’: TWH, Preface to Poems (1890).
251 ‘wayward’ stuck: See Charles R. Anderson, Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise (1960; repr. NY: Anchor, 1966).
252 ‘sometimes weary …’: LD to Amherst friend, Mrs Dickerman, quoted in her daughter, Elizabeth Dickerman (of Amherst, Smith class of 1894, whose mother had been close friend of LD), ‘Portrait of Two Sisters: Emily and Lavinia Dickinson’, Smith Alumnae Quarterly (Feb 1954), 79. Copy in Smith College archives.
252 MLT’s daily visits to LD: Diary, November 1888. Yale: microfilm.
253 ‘No publisher …’: MLT recalled these words in ‘ED’s Literary Debut’, Harper’s Magazine, CLX (Mar 1930), 463–4.
253 commercial rather than private publication: A & M, 294.
253 MLT’s typewriter: Exhibited at the Homestead in Oct 2007. ED collection, Jones Library.
254 Assignation ‘up stairs’: MLT, Diary (16 Oct 1888). Yale.
255 Far off in the future …: Sewall and A & M, for instance, relay the Todd story.
255 ‘gave it up definitely. Then …’: MLT to TWH (16 Dec 1890). AC.
256 Look like the innocent flower: Macbeth. Letter from Lady Macbeth to her husband.
256 ‘uplifted’: (1890). A & M, 296.
257 baskets of poems; transcribing at Vinnie’s; hustled out of sight: Recalled by DPT. MTB, ‘Notes taken during the talk with my father’ (typed Oct 1967). Yale.
257 Miss Graves’s mistakes: Franklin, Editing ED, 13–14.
257 DPT helped to sort: DPT’s reminiscence of MLT’s editing, as told to MTB (Sept 1934). He was by then mentally ill, but what he says rings true. Yale.
257 ‘comets of thought’: MLT to Mr E. D. Hardy (Dec 1894), who replaced Niles (following his death in May 1894) at Roberts Bros, when she proposed they publish a Dickinson yearbook with her ‘comets of thought’ for each day. AC.
257 DPT and Olive Schreiner: Niles to MLT (13 Oct 1891). AC. MLT had read The Story of an African Farm in 1888. Her diary notes that she didn’t like it.
258 TWH came to discuss transcripts: Diary. Yale: microfilm. Wineapple, White Heat, 276. There’s conflicting evidence (from MLT) that she called on him at his home at 25 Buckingham Street, Cambridge, or perhaps these were different occasions. Wineapple suggests plausibly that ‘Mabel enhanced her role as Dickinson’s perspicacious sponsor’.
258 MLT’s version of meeting with TWH; TWH astonished: MLT, Journals, IV, 75. Yale.
258 ‘I don’t know …’: WAD to MLT (25 Apr 1890). A & M, 358.
258 ‘unwise to perpetuate …’: Niles to TWH (10 June 1890) from Arlington in Boston. AC. Confirmed in MLT, Journals, V, 78. Yale.
259 reader’s report: enclosed in reply from Mr Niles. AC.
259 ‘I died for Beauty’: (c. 1862). J449/Fr448.
259 LD as ‘Maltese pussycat’: MLT, Journals, V, 77. Yale: microfilm.
260 MLT justified her editing: Journals, V (30 Nov 1890).
260 ‘a shaft of light …’: Quoted by MLT in her essay ‘The Evolution of a Style’. Yale.
260 ‘I never lost as much but twice’: (c. autumn 1858). J49/Fr39.
261 ‘As she stood …’: The Commonwealth, Boston (20 Feb 1892), cited AB, 196.
261 ‘kill’: MLT, Journals, V, 80. Yale.
261 never met face to face; ‘flitting’: Admitted under legal cross-questioning. See ch. 12.
261 Howells on ED: review for Harper’s (Jan 1891).
262 Elihu Vedder on ED: DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95, box 8.
262 ‘love at first sight’: (12 Jan 1892). DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
262 Christina Rossetti on ED: Niles to MLT (17 Feb 1891). AC.
262 Alice James on ED: (6 Jan 1892). Diary of Alice James, 227.
262 ‘I’m Nobody’: (c. late 1861). J288/Fr260.
263 London Daily News on ED: (Dec 1891).
263 reviews: MLT employed a cutting service, and kept a scrapbook. AC: box 20, f.1.
263 ‘You are the only person …’: TWH to MLT (15 Dec 1890). Todd Papers, AC.
263 stopped speaking: MLT, Journals, V (16 June 1891), 86.
263 ‘for her’ and ‘I think …’: SHD to TWH (c. 1890). AC: Todd, 110–11.
263 ‘laziness’: Journals, V (30 Nov 1890). Yale. Well-chosen lines quoted in A & M.
263 ‘Just lost’: In pencil addressed ‘Sue’. First published, entitled ‘Called Back’, in the Independent, 43 (12 Mar 1891), 1, repr. J160/Fr132. MS in the Univ of Virginia. Early in 1861 ED made another fair copy for booklet 10. Contesting correspondence in AB, 114–20.
263 the wind from ‘beyond the world’: ‘2nd Debate between the Body and Soul’ (1911) in Inventions of the March Hare, ed. Christopher Ricks (Faber and Harcourt, 1996).
264 ‘waste’: Burnt Norton: V.
264 plan to use the prose: To Higginson, op. cit.; also to William Hayes Ward (8 Feb 1891). Lowell Collection, Houghton. Letters to Ward in DEA: www.emilydickinson.org/susan/table_of_contents.html.
265 eighty poems: Houghton. ‘Notes Towards a Volume of Emily Dickinson’s Writings’. www.emilydickinson.org/susan/table_of_contents.html.
265 fifty-nine: Before the ED collection was bought by Harvard, Mary Hampson found this small packet of poems copied by SHD, about half of them unpublished and half in The Single Hound. Fr1686–1744.
265 spirit of strife: Phrase from Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
265 LD’s legal protest to Ward: (21 Mar 1891). DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
266 Ward declined: Ward to WAD (21 Mar 1891). DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
266 ‘Indian Pipes and Witch Hazel’: TWH to Niles (27 July 1891). AC.
266 ‘fascicules’: LD talked of ‘the little volumes’. Thomas Johnson called them ‘packets’. But ‘fascicles’ has so far won out in Dickinson scholarship.
266 letters ‘a private trust …’: Franklin, Editing ED, 84.
266 Mrs Ford: She died soon after.
267 mutilation of ‘One sister …’: See figures 8, 9 and 10 in Franklin, The Editing of ED.
267 allegation it was WAD who did the mutilations: In Open Me Carefully, Smith and Hart ascribe the mutilation to Todd who was trying ‘to hide Susan’s central role in Dickinson’s writing process’ and to ‘suppress any trace of Susan as Emily’s primary audience’.
267 revival of Lady Macbeth imperatives: MLT to WAD. A & M, 371.
267 MLT omitted correspondence with SHD: MLT did have occasion to refer to the reproachful letter Emily sent when Sue, as a single young woman, went silent out west. ‘Perhaps this is the point at which our paths diverge’, Emily writes to Sue in 1854. Hardly representative of the lifelong tie that followed Sue’s return and capitulation to marriage. This sentence would of course appear to support MLT’s argument that the two women were mostly estranged.
268 cut references to sickness: Home, 54.
268 Norcross cousins shielded ED from biographical intrusion: Conceivably, they wished to conceal confidential comments about Lavinia, the feud, or Mabel Todd herself, but in such a case it would have been simple to eliminate the relevant letters rather than the entire batch.
268 Fanny Norcross to MLT: Todd 329. AC. Box 18, f.16. AB, 282–3.
269 MLT’s unpublished essay on the letters: ‘The Evolution of a Style’. Yale.
270 ‘Think of …’: MLT to E. D. Hardy (3 Dec 1894). AC.
270 ‘a peculiarly delicate …’: MLT to Niles (26 Feb 1894). AC.
270 ‘in the cold impartiality of print’: Ibid.
270 Hardy succeeded Niles: Niles died in Perugia in May 1894.
271 ‘This may all seem … queer …’: WAD to Hardy (25 Sept 1894). AC.
272 ‘in a heap’: WAD to Hardy (22 August 1894). AC. The aggressive tone covers the fact that WAD is in fact climbing down. This letter accepts joint royalties.
272 another run of copies: ALH, Foreword to FF, xiv, alleges that of the second printing of 1500 copies, 1200 were returned. This is hearsay only, part of the anti-Todd campaign to suggest that MLT’s 1894 edition of the Letters shouldn’t count.
272 crusader: LD to Niles (27 July 1891). AC.
272 ‘Thermopylae’: ED to MLT (19 July 1884). See ch. 9, above.
273 ‘whimsical’ etc: Preface to Poems (1890).
273 ‘definitely posed …’: MLT, Journals, V (18 Oct 1891), 98. Yale. Cited Sewall, i, 227.
273 Habegger’s persuasive analysis of ‘This is my Letter …’: Talk: ‘Some Problems’.
273 MLT’s review column: (Nov 1890). In Scrapbook, AC. She reviewed her own edition, together with three other Roberts Bros books.
274 ED unlike the daguerreotype: MLT to Niles (13 July 1893). AC. The portrait of the three Dickinson children is in EDR and a copy now hangs in the parlour of the Homestead.
274 ‘soften the eye …’ and ‘altogether softened’: MLT to Niles (17 Jan 1894). AC.
275 ‘neuralgic darts …’; ‘the hardly human dumbness’: The Critic (1891). MLT’s Scrapbook, op. cit.
275 ‘picturesque’ life; ‘gentle …’: MLT’s review column in Home Magazine (Nov 1890).
275 ‘startling … poetic bombs’: ‘Evolution of a Style’ (c. 1894). Yale.
276 ‘no comprehension …’: WAD to TWH, quoted in Dickerman, ‘Portrait of Two Sisters’, op. cit.
276 ‘inciting voice’, etc: To Charles Clark (mid June 1883). L827.
276 ‘Joan of Arc’: LD to Niles (27 July 1891). AC. Cited by Jane Ward in her 2007 exhibition at the Homestead.
IV: THE WAR BETWEEN THE HOUSES
12: LAVINIA’S STAND
279 not a cent: Miss Vryling Wilder Buffam to MTB (16 Nov 1938). AB, 368.
280 DPT bathed LD: MLT, Diary (21 Dec 1894). Yale: microfilm, reel 3.
280 ‘had the best’ of both men’s lives: A & M, 372.
281 relief: Ned to Frothingham (Mar 1898) says that ‘recent changes in the family’ had rendered his life ‘endurable’ before the case arose. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
281 ‘My best friend …’: ‘A Line A Day Diary’ (16 and 17 Aug 1895). Yale: 496B, series VII, box 108, f.55.
281 ‘degrading …’: Maggie Maher recalled this exchange. Trial mss.
281 ‘My Austin …’; ‘I feel …’; ‘I want …’: Diary. Yale: microfilm.
282 ‘on a volcano …’; ‘real … self’: Journals (May 1896), 136. Yale: microfilm, reel 9.
282 ‘of pain’; ‘Youth is my role’: Journals, VII (Sept 1896).
282 ‘signet royal …’: Journals, VIII (1897).
282 Omaha plan: WAD to J. Clark (8 Aug 1893). Yale: 496C, box 97, f.157. Sewall, i, 184, notes that the letter is a draft and may not have been sent.
283 ‘A deaf God’: A & M, 375.
283 ‘And if my life …’; ‘My advancements …’: A & M, 361.
284 money meant a lot: When advancement of the needy is debated in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910), it’s suggested that the most effective gift to an able but poor aspirant is not, in the first instance, education; it’s a certain number of pounds.
284 ‘no treason’ and ‘Ever be …’: (Aug 1885). See ch. 9, above.
284 WAD’s bequest to MLT: Yale: box 97, f.153.
285 nearly $34,000: LD Papers, Hay Library. Inventory of the estate (Apr 1896) added up to $33,890.
285 ‘slippery …’ etc: Diary (6 Oct 1895). Yale. Cited by Walsh, 185.
286 measurements of meadow: Original deed in MLT’s hand. Trial mss. The 290-foot measurement is the length of the adjoining Dell. This means that she was extending the width of her plot to 54 feet, and not the mere 13 feet she alleged in her later recollections.
287 Bumpus longed to make love: A & M, 412.
287 MLT’s exchange with Spaulding: ‘Mabel Todd Speaks’ TS (10 Oct 1931). Yale: box 101, f.242.
288 scene in the dining room: Reconstructed from statements before and during the ensuing court case.
288 Maggie told LD: Mr Palmer, WAD’s executor, saw the deed in a business magazine and confronted Maggie about it in the Amherst post office.
290 ‘paper’: Mr Spaulding corroborated this in court on 3 Mar 1898.
291 ‘mere trifles …’: A & M, 408.
291 ‘witchesmare’: Ned to friend Theodore Frothingham in the aftermath of the court case (7 Mar 1898): ‘16 years witchesmare’, which therefore goes back to 1882. As in ‘nightmare’. Like his aunt, Ned invents a word. An alternative reading of the ms word could be ‘witchesmere’. Houghton: bMS Am 1996 (2). In demonising MLT at the time of the court case, Ned pays her back for slurs on his mother.
291 Ned to LD: DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
292* a thousand dollars her due: ‘Mabel Todd Speaks’, op. cit.
292* royalty statements on first edition of ED’s letters: LD Papers, Hay Library.
293 ‘wallop’: MLT, Diary (27 May 1897). Yale: microfilm, reel 3. Quoted in A & M, 414.
293 Mr Hills’s claim: Deposition taken by LD’s counsel, Mr Field (1897). Trial mss.
293 ‘leeches’: Springfield Republican (4 Mar 1898), reporting the case.
293 Miss Seelye’s report of Maggie’s words: Deposition taken by Mr Field (1897). Mss.
294 ‘All right’: MLT reports in her Diary (20 Dec 1897). Yale: microfilm, reel 3.
294 ‘too good a case …’: ‘MLT Speaks’, op. cit.
294 WAD repudiates his children: recalled by MLT, Ibid.
295 evidence of Maggie Maher: Trial mss.
See A & M, ‘The Law Suit and the Trial’, 409–13. This informed summary has the advantage of being available. Other sources are the trial mss and ‘MLT Speaks’.
299 ‘fool’; ‘Paddy’; ‘pack of lies’; ‘disgust’: ‘MLT Speaks’ (10 Oct 1931). Yale: box 101, f.242. Some material synthesised by Sewall, i, appendix II, section 4.
299 MDB locked the piano: Ibid.
300 to sue as a form of therapy: Janet Malcolm makes a brilliant comparison with Freud’s talking cure in The Journalist and the Murderer (New Yorker, 1990).
300 date of Amherst Slander Case: Summonses (dated 26 Feb 1898). Trial MSS.
300 Hills pleading sick: He did not record slander evidence but did record a deposition for the land trial. It’s unclear whether Miss Seelye testified at the land or the slander trial.
301 land trial records: Trial MSS: Hampshire Superior Court Civil Action No. 125, including depositions by Maggie Maher, Jane Seelye and Mr Hills; Houghton Ms Am 2521; newspaper cuttings in the Houghton’s box of family papers, bMS Am 1118.95 and newspaper cuttings (the Springfield Republican and the Hartford Courant) at Yale: 496C, series VII, box 101, f.241; copies of the Bill of Complaint and the Defendants’ Answer in Jones Library, Amherst. Official Transcript, Yale: box 101, f.239, including another copy of the Bill of Complaint, a summary of the land trial in the Superior Court: ‘Report of the Evidence’, and the Supreme Court summary.
301 LD’s courtroom outfit: ‘MLT Speaks’, op. cit.
301 LD’s hairstyle: LD to her cousin, John Graves of Boston. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
302 ‘ridiculous’: AB, 359; Sewall, i, appendix II, 262.
302 MLT’s courtroom hat: ‘MLT Speaks’, op. cit.
303 wrinkles; teeth: MLT’s reminiscences in AB.
303 Field remembered LD: Letter to MDB (26 Nov 1932). Correspondence concerning the publication of ED. Houghton: MS Am 1118.97–1118.98.
303 deceive the elect; ‘make anybody believe …’: MLT, Journals, VIII. Yale: microfilm, reel 9.
304 LD’s ‘forlorn look’: ‘MLT Speaks’, op. cit.
306 ‘lesson …’: Ned to Frothingham (Mar 1898). DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
306 asked her to edit her poems: Hartford Courant (2 Mar 1898), reporting the case.
309 Taft’s summing-up: Springfield Republican (4 Mar 1898). A & M, 422.
309 ‘pounded’: MLT’s word. Diary (3 Mar 1898). Yale: microfilm, reel 3.
309 3 April: MLT records the judgment in her diary on 15 Apr. Yale: microfilm, reel 3.
310 ‘Something was done …’: Ibid.
310 ‘kills me daily’: Diary (21 Apr 1898). Ibid.
310 Harvard Law School: ‘MLT Speaks’, op. cit. MLT often lied, but this rings true.
310 ‘own legs’: ‘MLT Speaks’ (10 Oct 1931). Yale: box 101, f.242.
311 Mrs Washington Cable: A friend of MLT.
311 Supreme Court case: It was case no. 172, argued in Sept 1898 and set out in the Massachusetts Supreme Court Reports, 183.
312 ‘I am … crushed’: Diary (29 Nov 1898).
312 sensitive as a leaf; a chain; ‘I shall die …’: Journals, VIII. Yale: microfilm, reel 9.
14: DEFEATS OF THE FIRST GENERATION
313 fourth volume: MLT repeats this intention in her recollections thirty-three years later. MLT’s note in 1931: ‘I was in the midst of preparing a fourth volume …’.
313 ‘disgrace …’: Ned to Theodore Frothingham (Mar 1898). Houghton: bMS Am 1996 (2).
313 escaped to Europe: summer 1897, with the trial due, then, for the autumn.
313 ‘witchesmare’: Ned to Frothingham (7 Mar 1898), op. cit.
314 ‘taking his usual drive …’: Letters to MDB (11 Jan 1885). Hay Library, St A. 36.
314 Potomac: Letters to MDB. Hay Library, St A. 36.
314 ‘smooth front’: Ned to MDB (26 Jan 1885). St Armand, New England Quarterly (1988), 373.
314 ‘without … a row’: Ned to Frothingham (17 Jan 1898).
314 ‘rains …’: Ned to Frothingham (15 Dec 1897).
314 Alix: St Armand calls her ‘Alix’. The Dickinsons of Amherst, 135.
314 so dear a girl: Ned to Frothingham (17 Jan 1898).
315 ‘too happy to be wise …’: SHD to Frothingham (4 Jan 1898).
315 ‘pinch …’: Ned to Frothingham (17 Jan 1898).
315 Ned’s agony: His cousin, daughter of Martha Gilbert Smith, speaks of his ‘agony’ in a condolence letter to SHD. Hay Library.
315 fiction of earlier date: MDB to Frothingham (2 May 1913): ‘Sixteen years ago tomorrow Ned died.’
315 the case killed Ned: Plausible suggestion in A & M, 423. Frothingham sent roses to Alice Hill, who replied to thank him on 11 May 1898 (Houghton: bMS Am 1996 (4)).
315 ‘After Ned’s death …’: Letter to MTB (20 Feb 1935), cited Sewall, i, 261. See also Mary Lee Hall to Genevieve Taggard, biographer of ED (4 Nov 1929 and 14 Sept 1930), Yale: Todd-Bingham archive. Cited in Sewall, i, appendix II, 254.
317 LD tore out …: DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
317 ‘Did Miss Vinnie …’: letter to Mary Lee Hall (20 Mar 1934). Cited Sewall, i, appendix II, 260.
317 ‘Millicent, you never …’: (20 Feb 1935). Cited Sewall, i, appendix II, 261.
318 ‘decided not to breathe …’ etc: An attentive recorder, MLT made a collection of LD’s sayings. Yale: series V, box 82, f.402.
318 ‘to spare expense …’: To Norcross cousins (7 Oct 1863). L285.
318 LD’s poems: folder, typed and dated 1898. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
319 MLT noted LD’s death: Journals, VIII. Yale: microfilm, reel 9.
319 MLT and the medium: Journals, IX. Yale: microfilm, reel 9.
319 Bleak House: MLT, Diary (26 July 1897). Yale: microfilm, reel 3.
321 Amy Angell Collier: Correspondence in Montague Papers, MS division, New York Public Library.
322 ‘heartbreaking associations’: MDB to Frothingham (1903). DFP.
322 ‘victims …’: MDB to Frothingham (25 May 1907). DFP.
322 ‘slanders’ etc: to Frothingham (22 Mar 1907). DFP.
322 ‘seriously ill’: MDB to Frothingham (25 May 1907). DFP.
323 ‘some’; ‘fraudulent business …’: Montague, recalling this talk, to Mary Hampson (7 Aug 1952). Contracts and Correspondence, Houghton: bMS Am 1118.18.
323 ‘spell’; ‘hypnotic’; ‘clasping …’: Essay, ‘New Year’s Eve, 1900’. Yale.
324 MLT on DPT’s affairs; ‘justification’: Journals, cited by A & M, 50–1.
325 ‘Austin was mine …’: Essay, ‘New Year’s Eve, 1900’, op. cit.
325 ‘Sue hated … love’: MLT’s reminiscences in note form. Yale: subject files: WAD, 496C, series VII, box 103, f.266 (n.d.).
325 ‘God …’; ‘killing’; ‘irrevocably’; ‘wickedest …’: Essay, ‘New Year’s Eve, 1900’, op. cit.
325 Sue’s death: SHD died of a heart condition at the age of eighty-two.
15: TWO DAUGHTERS
326 MTB’s memories: Yale: Bingham Papers, 496D. Autobiographical TSS, mainly in box 46.
326 ‘my early childhood …’: MTB, aged eighty-four, to her mother’s friend Mr Green, curator of Jones Library, Amherst (28 Jan 1965). Jones Library, Special Collections.
327 sees ED ‘every day’: MTB, taped recollections. Sterling Library, Yale: Historical Recordings. For LD in the kitchen, see AB, 14–15.
327 MTB’s memories of the dining room, Maggie and LD: ‘Reminiscences: 23–30 August 1927’. Yale: box 46, f.6.
327 ‘That they could be human …’: Ibid.
327 ‘dear quaking voice’: (21 July 1933). Yale: box 46, f.1.
328 MLT’s rouge: (21 July 1933, nine months after MLT’s death). Yale: box 46, f.7.
328 ‘X woman’: (15 July 1905). Yale: box 46, f.6.
328 ‘primly placed’: Ibid.
329 ‘all that Mamma has left now’: MTB recalled making this remark to ‘the snake’ of Amherst, Mrs Grosvenor. ‘Reminiscences’, op. cit.
329 ‘obnoxious …’; ‘Deliver …’: Memoir of 1905. Autobiographical pieces, op. cit.
330 ‘imperial Girl’: (June 1885). L987.
330 jaunty hat: ED to MDB (late 1882). L787. The photograph (Houghton) which prompted this note has inscribed on the back: ‘Mattie Dickinson, 19 November 1882’.
330 ‘freedom …’: FF, 66.
330 ‘live in vain’: L403.
331 ‘martial…’: To MDB (Oct 1884). L942.
331 ‘worse’: Journals, V (Oct 1891), 87. Yale: microfilm.
331 ‘I knew …’: To SHD. L886.
331 The Single Hound: Reissued, with MDB’s Preface, by Hesperus (London, 2005).
332 MDB to Frothingham after SHD’s death: (13 Feb 1914). DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
332 ‘Your praise is good …’: (c. summer 1861). L238. Quoted by MDB in Preface, The Single Hound.
333 ‘Adventure most unto itself …’: Became last stanza of ‘This consciousness that is aware’ (c. 1864–5). J822/Fr817. The MS addressed to ‘Sue’ and signed ‘Emily’ was pasted into MDB’s copy of this volume. The Single Hound, 7.
333 ‘I fit for them’: The Single Hound, 94.
333 ‘The Devil …’: (c. 1879). J1479/Fr1510. The Single Hound, 107, preferring the alternative ‘finest’ to ‘best’ friend in line 2. This alternative is more pleasing to the ear and subtler as to sense.
333 Kate Scott Turner Anthon’s recollections: Letter (8 Oct 1914) from Whitebridge, Grasmere, England, to MDB on receiving copy of The Single Hound. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
334 ‘Vesuvius at Home’: ‘Volcanoes be in Sicily’ (transcribed by SHD). J1705/Fr1691. Adrienne Rich used the phrase as title for her brilliant essay on ED.
334 volcanic narrative; Pompeii: ‘I have never seen “Volcanoes” —’ (c. spring 1860). J175/Fr165.
334 ‘beloved old spot’: To Frothingham (6 Dec 1914). DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
334 ‘some of the days …’: Ibid.
334 ‘Just the changing lights …’: To Frothingham (13 Feb 1914).
334 ‘to us’: To Frothingham (6 Dec 1914), op. cit.
334 ‘a passionate attachment’ in Germany: MTB, TS reminiscence, ‘12 May 1959’. Yale: box 46, f.8. MTB does not name this woman on paper, but details she relays on tape correlate with a companion in Germany called Marta Milinowsky, who had an American mother and was head of the piano department at Vassar until 1958.
335 ‘humbled’: ‘12 May 1959’. Yale: box 46, f.8.
335 Joseph Thomas: Ibid.
335 MTB’s geography of France: (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1919).
336 privilege: letter to Mr Green of Jones Library after Bingham’s death in 1952.
337 ‘It revolts … me’: Autobiographical TSS, ‘Reminiscences: 28 August 1927’. Yale: box 46, f.6.
338* ‘re-editing’: MDB’s claim in letter to McCarthy (23 Nov 1930). Houghton: Correspondence with McCarthy: bMS Am 1118.97–1118.98 (123).
339 ‘scarcely seen’: To SHD (Feb 1884), on being shown a photo of MDB at 18. L886. MDB is not mentioned by name in this letter but the editor surmises the reference must be to her.
340 ‘of course’: Amy Lowell to MLT (23 Jan 1923). Houghton: bMS Lowell 19.
340 ‘will perform a life …’: MLT to Amy Lowell (8 Sept 1923). Houghton: bMS Lowell 19 (1211).
340 ‘my dear mis-read Emily’: To Amy Lowell (17 Sept 1923). Ibid.
340 ‘dear Miss Lowell’: (26 Nov 1923). Ibid.
340 asked MTB to put a stop to DPT: Letter (30 Jan 1924). Ibid.
340 Wadsworth’s image in the twentieth century: One example is Albert J. Gelpi in Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1965): ‘Wadsworth would seem the unquestionable choice for Master.’ The first ED biographer of the twenty-first century, Alfred Habegger, in a talk, ‘Some Problems’, is rightly sceptical of ‘the patently spurious elements in Bianchi’s highly colored version of the romance where she suggests that ED fell instantly in love and then loftily renounced her married lover’.
340 MDB’s Wadsworth legend: LL, 46–50. MDB misdates 1855 visit to Philadelphia as 1853.
341 ED on Wadsworth: L727, 764 and 737.
341 ‘best earthly friend’: To James D. Clark (March 1883). L807.
341 ‘It’s easy to invent a Life’: (c. 1863). J724/Fr747.
341 MTB’s copy of LL: Yale. Ridicule of HHJ embellishment, 74.
342 ‘astonishingly good’ reviews: To Amy Montague (9 June 1924). Montague Papers.
342 MDB’s new collection of poems: The Wandering Eros, published by HM, following her ED books.
342 Samuel Eliot Morrison: HM to MDB (14 Oct 1924). Houghton: bMS Am 1925.
343 Ned’s class: To Amy Montague (9 June 1924). Montague Papers.
343 review of MDB’s poems: clipping in HM correspondence. Houghton: bMS Am 1925 (197).
343 1924 as the first time Mamma spoke of the Dickinsons: MTB, historical recording (1964). Sterling Library, Yale.
343 ED ‘enjoyed …’: Yale: subject files: WAD, 496C, series VII, box 103, f.266 (n.d.).
343 ‘Are you going …’: MTB’s TS recollections, ‘Veterans Day, 1955’, op. cit.
343 MTB on ‘pi-racy’: Tape relating the legal battles in the feud, 1964. Historical recordings, Yale.
343 ‘It ought to be done …’: (27 July 1924). Houghton MS Lowell 19 (95).
343 ‘In so far …’: In conversation with MTB (1931). Yale: 496D, box 103, f.602.
344 the lock’s bell: MTB, introduction to Bolts of Melody (1945).
344 ‘extracted the Emily things …’: MTB to Amy Lowell (13 Nov 1924). Lowell Papers, op. cit.
16: THE BATTLE OF THE DAUGHTERS
346 ‘growth …’; ‘Comédie humaine’: ‘Reminicences’ (28 Aug 1927). Yale: box 46, f.6.
347 ‘I hesitate to ask …’: ‘Reminiscences’ (29 Aug 1927). Yale: box 46, f.6.
347 ‘Though I respect …’: MTB’s notes on visits to Dr MacPherson. Yale: box 48, f.32. Yale also has her notes on further visits, in 1940–52, to Dr Ehrenclou (box 48, f.37). The latter sound banal, not up to MTB’s intelligence.
347 ALH lived at The Evergreens: MTB, ‘Veterans Day, 1955’, op. cit. ALH ‘had been living with [MDB] for several years’.
347 MDB’s rejected novels: ‘The Great Deliverer’ and ‘Andrew Djubzyke’.
348 ‘an almost unbroken narrative …’: MDB, introduction to ED, Further Poems, viii.
348 ‘trembles … dimity apron’: Ibid.
348 Louis Untermeyer: 16 March 1929. Quoted approvingly in FF, 52.
348 ‘the veils …’: MDB quotes this proudly to HM (27 Apr 1930). Houghton: bMS Am 1925.
349 MLT opening her treasure chest in 1929: A cagy letter (dated 7 July 1930) from MLT to Mr Green of Jones Library, Amherst, reveals that she had distributed Dickinson papers in four different places: the Springfield warehouse; a safe in Florida; a safe in New York (possibly Millicent’s when she was teaching at Columbia); and ‘another safe’. Jones Library.
349 MLT supported Taggard: MLT told MTB at this point that the two men in ED’s life were Gould and Wadsworth. It’s unlikely that Austin had ever named them.
349 Mary Lee Hall as Taggard’s source: Sewall, ii, 419–22.
349 ‘Hallelujah …’: L34
349 Miss Hall’s gossip about Gould: Taggard, 115, 336–7, 357.
349 ‘would never have …’: Taggard, 120.
350 Josephine Pollitt: ED: The Human Background of her Poetry (Harper, 1930).
350 Brittle Heaven: (NY: Samuel French, 1935). Pohl collaborated with Vincent Yorke. Copy in Bodleian Library. Original title was Stardust and Thistledown.
350 On stage: The play was produced at the Vanderbilt Theater, New York, and also at the Tremont Theater, Boston, during the 1933–4 season.
350 MDB and the centenary: Letters to HM in Houghton: bMS Am 1925 (197); letters to McCarthy, especially 23 Nov 1930, in Houghton: bMS Am 1118.97–1118.98 (123).
351 ‘driving force’; ‘Perhaps I exist …’; ‘worthy of a Henry James’; ‘ammunition’: MTB, ‘1929’. Yale: box 47, f.14.
351 ‘Much against …’: MLT to Mr Green of Jones Library (5 Feb 1930). Jones Library.
352 LD ‘did consent …’: Yale: box 82, f.390.
352 MLT’s preface to Letters, 1931: Preface and drafts at Yale: 496D, box 87, f.307.
353 MLT printed letters about Wadsworth: His friends, the Clarks, corresponded with ED in the mid-1880s.
354 ‘Existence’: J443, op. cit.
354 LD ‘had an enormous mouth …’ etc: ‘MLT Speaks’ (10 Oct 1931). Yale: box 101, f.242.
354 ‘Vinnie ought …’; Maggie ‘lied …’: Ibid.
355 ‘hideous’: Ibid.
355 ‘for that she practised …’ and ‘It is hard …’: To MTB who typed it (7 Sept 1932). Yale: 496D, box 103, f.602.
355 ‘That such have died …’: J1030/Fr1082. MLT had published this in Poems: Third Series (1896). The tombstone quotation is not quite accurate.
355 ‘point of no return’: ‘MTB’, interview in Current Biography (June 1961), 11.
356 ‘You must realize …’: MTB, ‘Veterans Day, 1955’, op. cit. Repeats it ‘1 May 1959’. Yale: box 46, f.8.
356 ‘Budgie …’; It was as if; ‘nothing else …’: MTB, ‘1 May 1959’. Yale: box 46, f.8.
356 warning not to publish in MDB’s lifetime: MTB, ‘Veterans Day, 1955’, op. cit.
356 mother as co-discoverer: Yale: 496D, box 46, f.1.
356 ‘objectionable book’: To HM (16 Oct 1931). HM. Houghton: bMS Am 1925 (197).
356 Field warned: Letter to MDB (18 Nov 1931). Houghton: bMS Am 1118.97–1118.98 (79).
357 Todd’s strong position: Greenslet to MDB (28 Dec 1931). Ibid.
357 ‘personal book …’: MDB to HM (14 July 1932). Ibid.
357 ‘disposes …’: To HM (25 July 1932). Ibid.
357 Greenslet’s warnings to MDB: (15 July and 19 Aug 1931). Ibid.
357 wearing white … ‘a memorial …’: FF, 51.
357 ‘Readers waited …’: Untermeyer, ‘Thoughts after a Centenary’ (20 June 1931).
357 memorandum: (23 Sept 1931), just before Letters (1931) came out. HM correspondence. Houghton: bMS Am 1925.
358 American Literature: Morris U. Schappes, ‘Errors in Mrs. Bianchi’s Edition of ED’s Letters’ (1933).
358 pedantic fuss: MDB to Mr Linscott at HM (11 Apr 1933). HM correspondence, op. cit.
358 MDB on photo of ED as child: To Lovell Thompson at HM (14 Oct 1932). Ibid.
359 The inaccurate editing went on: Easy though it has been to ridicule the inaccuracies of these volumes, in Further Poems of 1929 MDB and ALH did attempt (ahead of later, professional editors Johnson and Franklin) to register the poet’s lineation. In this they anticipate post-structuralist textual studies of the 1990s (continuing into the present century).
359 ‘disarray …’: Cited by Franklin, The Editing of ED’s Poems.
359 Dickinson exhibit at World’s Fair: MDB to HM (20 July 1933). HM correspondence, op. cit.
359 MDB grateful for support: To Amy Collier Montague (28 July 1933). Montague-Collier Papers, NYPL.
359 ‘save such as we of the heart’: (7 Apr 1934). Ibid.
359 ‘Be Amy …’: (7 Apr 1935). Ibid.
359 ‘Whatever she did …’: ‘10 November 1934’. Yale: box 46, f.7.
359 ‘In the early days …’: TS reminiscence (1935). Yale: box 46, f.8.
360 4 Feb 1938; fog; the octopus; ‘Hatred …’: ‘4 February 1938’. Yale.
362 Indian Pipes on the cover: Paperback edition by University of Michigan in 1957, repr. 1960.
362 MDB’s will: (15 November 1938). AC: MDB’s Misc. MSS, folder 2.
363 ‘pilgrims’: ALH to Amy Montague (Sept 1940). Montague Papers.
363 Pearl Strachan: interview in the Christian Science Monitor, Boston (4 Sept 1940), illustrated with photo of The Evergreens and the doctored image of ED. Enclosed with the above letter to Amy Montague.
363 worked with ALH: ALH to Amy Montague (6 Oct 1940). Montague Papers.
363 ‘both told me…’: Preface to new edition of Letters (1931), with drafts at Yale: 496D, box 87, f.307.
364 will ‘was never found’: 1931 is pencil date of TS fragment amongst MTB’s conversations with Mamma. Yale: 496D, box 103, f.603.
364 ‘no authorization’; ‘lick it yet’; ‘I should have collapsed …’: ‘25 May 1959’. Yale: box 46, f.8.
364 Alexander Lindey: MTB, tape recording (1964) on the history of legal battles in the feud, op. cit.
365 ‘feuds… dissolved in death’: AB, 399.
365 photo of cheque: AB, 194.
365 ‘blight’: AB, 15.
365 SHD the reason for ED’s solitude: Ibid.
366 MTB’s 1955 statement: ‘Veterans Day, 1955’, op. cit.
367 Wallace Keep: ‘Recollections of Lavinia Dickinson’ (15 April 1933). Yale: 496D, box 84, f.233. AB, 29–9.
367 MTB to Keep: (9 May 1945). From home, 1661 Crescent Place, Washington DC.
368 so it proved: MLT’s diaries show that Alice Hill was often with her at The Dell.
368 ‘crotchety’; unimportant; ‘cantankerous’: AB, 247–8.
17: POSTHUMOUS CAMPAIGNS
This chapter is indebted to an article by Leslie A. Morris, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at the Houghton Library: her Foreword to Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, where she notes how, after the lawsuit, ‘the feud between the Dickinson and the Todds colored all subsequent work on Emily Dickinson’.
369 ‘to take care of Emily’: MH repeats this to Gilbert Montague in a letter (1 Aug 1952) that reflects on how William (Bill) McCarthy had controlled everything. Hampson correspondence, Houghton: bMS Am 1923.
370 Montague’s appearance: Photographs in the Houghton Library and in the NYPL.
370 $5 million: New York Times obituary (Feb 1961).
370 boyhood ties: Edwin De T. Bechtel echoes Montague’s boast in letter to him (31 May 1950). NYPL: Montague Papers, box 2.
371 Cadogans: Sir Alexander and Lady Cadogan were house guests in 1946.
371 Montague invited MTB to dine; ‘a-quiver’; ‘Your understanding …’: NYPL: Montague Papers, box 1: Bingham correspondence.
371 Archibald MacLeish and Robert Penn Warren: MTB also mentions other emissaries from the Library of Congress, Verner Clapp and David Mearns.
371 McCarthy as MDB’s ‘slave’: McCarthy’s correspondence with MDB. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.97–1118.98 (123).
372 ‘charm …’ of MDB: McCarthy to ALH (2 Apr 1946). Houghton: bMS Am 1923.
372 ‘The Evergreens never…’: (20 Aug 1947). Ibid.
372 ‘thief’ etc: To McCarthy (12 Sept 1947). Ibid.
373 ‘a person convicted …’: To McCarthy (6 Dec 1947). Ibid.
373 a picture …: McCarthy to ALH (5 Dec 1947 and 27 Apr 1948). Hay Library: Correspondence, box 4, f.14. MH to Montague (22 June 1950). Houghton: bMS Am 1923.
373 ‘fabulous’; ‘I know …’: (5 Dec 1947 and 27 Apr 1948). Hay Library: box 4, f.14.
373 ‘Emily’ in ALH’s suitcase: ALH to McCarthy (6 Sept 1948). Houghton: bMS Am 1923 (2).
374 Mary attracted to ALH in 1931: To Montague (11 Dec 1958). Houghton: bMS Am 1923.
374 ‘staggering wealth’: Hampsons’ letters to McCarthy in Apr 1848, particularly ALH’s letter of 22 Apr and Mary’s preceding letter. Houghton: bMS Am 1923.
374 $40,000: McCarthy to the Hampsons (Sept 1948). Hay Library.
374 ‘to care for Emily’: Ibid.
374 McCarthy’s explorations: To Hampsons (14 Sept 1949). Houghton: bMS Am 1923.
374 pushes papers towards the bed: McCarthy to MH (20 Sept 1949). Houghton: bMS Am 1923. ALH alerted her to the ceiling.
375 McCarthy’s find of missing letters of Dickinson parents: McCarthy to ALH (31 Oct 1949). Houghton. Noted by Leslie A. Morris in Foreword to ED’s Herbarium.
375 letters from Lavinia Norcross: McCarthy to MH (20 Sept 1949). Houghton. He had found the letters the previous night.
375 ‘long night hours’: (26 Aug 1949). Houghton: bMS Am 1923.
375 ‘This is something …’; ‘crazy’: McCarthy to the Hampsons (Sept 1948). Hay Library.
376 crystal tears: Sent in Nov 1947, possibly as a wedding present. Houghton: bMS Am 1923.
376 ‘no way you could get more’: (4 Jan 1949). Houghton: bMS Am 1923.
376 Dumbarton Oaks: In Georgetown. At the time of the sale a different representative of the Rosenbach Company was in correspondence with Mrs Bliss; McCarthy made his offers to her later, between 1951 and 1953: almost all his offers were rare books, mostly on gardens and garden design. What negotiation existed during the winter of 1949–50 must have been oral and casual. In her Foreword to ED’s Herbarium, Leslie A. Morris mentions a call in early Feb 1950 from the Director of Dumbarton Oaks, John Thacher, to William Jackson, rejecting the Dickinson collection and suggesting that Jackson take over.
376 McCarthy seeking donors of immense fortune: Suggested by David Redden in conversation at Sotheby’s, New York (18 Sept 2009).
376 no books by ED: Checked by James Carder, the present curator. Afterwards, Mildred Bliss did contribute toward the ED Room at the Houghton Library.
376 24 Feb 1950: McCarthy correspondence. Houghton: bMS Am 1923.
376 McCarthy did not tell: A letter from ALH to Montague (1 June 1950) shows that he had been in the dark until the day before when the sale was announced to the public. NYPL: Montague Papers, box 2: Correspondence regarding Dickinson.
377 $50,000: Leslie A. Morris of the Houghton Library, in conversation (4 Sept 2009). In trying to estimate the value of this sum paid in 1950, it may be worth noting, for comparison, that in 1946 Sotheby’s in London sold thirty-four manuscripts for £50,000 and 673 illuminated manuscripts for £100,000. A collector in the early fifties, Mildred Bliss of Dumbarton Oaks, paid (the Rosenbach Company) as much as $750 and $2200 for two rare books. In Jan 1952 she paid $975 for a 378-page MS by an obscure eleventh-century scribe; $1008 for seven rare books; and in 1952 her account for nine rare books was nearly $3000.
377 ‘in excess of $100,000’: (18 July 1950). Houghton office: Montague files.
377 Montague’s 1953 estimate of the market value of ED’s papers: Boston dinner of the Massachusetts Historical Society under the auspices of the Club of Odd Volumes (to which both men belonged) on 13 Oct 1953, recorded in Jackson’s memorandum on 14 Oct. Houghton office: Montague files. (The memorandum is unsigned but one of the three copies is initialled ‘W.A.J.’.) Jackson does not record his own opinion.
378 experts: David Redden, head of manuscript sales at Sotheby’s, New York, considers $50,000 a good sum at the time, comparable to ‘millions’ in today’s terms.
379 ‘war of nerves …’; ‘disgust’: Montague to Jackson (17 Apr 1950). Houghton office: Montague files.
379 ‘corny’: Montague to Jackson (17 Apr 1950), op. cit.
379 ALH’s haemorrhage: Jackson to Montague (3 May 1950). Houghton office: Montague files.
379 ‘safely’: Letter to Montague. Houghton office: Montague files.
379 ALH did not know name of donor: Congratulatory letter to Montague (1 June 1950) indicates that the announcement on 31 May had revealed this to him. NYPL: Montague Papers, box 2.
379 31 May: MTB taped interview (1964). Yale: Historical Sound Recordings.
380 General Eisenhower to Montague: List of correspondents (1 June 1950). NYPL: Montague Papers, box 2, Correspondence regarding ED.
380 Morrow to Montague: Ibid.
380 mother’s shame: Jackson’s note to himself (5 Feb 1952, following a telephone discussion with Montague) that he should not allow Montague to pressure the Library ‘to expose to the world the mystery of events leading to [Mrs Bingham’s] acquisition of the papers’. Houghton office: Montague files.
381 MTB’s ‘relief …’; ‘greatest treasure …’: (31 May 1950). Cited by Leslie A. Morris in Foreword to ED’s Herbarium. Houghton office: Montague files.
381 MTB accepted Montague’s invitation: (11 July 1950). NYPL: Montague Papers, box 2.
381 ‘neither…’: Quoted by Leslie A. Morris, Foreword to ED’s Herbarium.
382 MTB’s legend: Quotations from AB, 93, 218, 219; Home, 409.
382 SHD’s ‘lush personality’: AB, 219.
382 ‘Emily grieved’: Ibid.
382 ‘I lost her’: ‘Now I knew I lost her’ (c. 1872). J1219/Fr1274. Not addressed or signed. If this poem is autobiographical, there are other candidates for loss: Mrs Holland (whom ED reproached for not writing after her move to New York in 1870), or Kate Turner Anthon whose friendship with ED ended after she remarried.
382 LD as old witch: AB, ch. 1: ‘Dramatis Personae’, 14.
382 passive: Revelation, 60.
382 ‘became the focus …’: MTB, ‘1951’. Yale: box 47, f.14.
383 ‘a positive … withdrawal’: Revelation, 3.
383 ‘endowed [Sue] with characteristics …’: Revelation, 3.
383 ‘Congratulations and hallelujahs’: Letter (18 May 1950). Cited by Leslie A. Morris, Foreword to ED’s Herbarium.
383 a gift: In March 1950 MTB did tell Jackson she might have to sell the papers, but she thought of a gift most of the time. Jackson advised Montague of this shift, and Montague still went on with the agreement. This was to be Harvard’s main defence in the ensuing battle with Montague.
385 ‘trade-off’: MTB, taped interview (1964), op. cit.
385 confrontations of Jackson and the Binghams, 1951: MTB gives a detailed account in ‘Veterans Day, 1955’, op. cit.
386 ‘be ye steadfast…’: Philippians, 4:8.
387 ‘stand still’: (1 Feb 1952). Houghton office: Montague files.
387 instalments: McCarthy’s reluctance: Leslie A. Morris, Foreword to Herbarium.
388 McCarthy’s comments on royalties: (14 June 1955). Houghton: bMS Am 1923.
388 McCarthy had driven the sale: MH to Montague (1952), op. cit.
389 ‘aura of frustration’: MTB, ‘Veterans Day, 1955’, op. cit.
389 SHD as scapegoat: TS reminiscence (1959). Yale.
389 ‘His anguish …’: MTB, TS ‘25 May 1959’. Yale: box 46, f.8.
391 ‘My lovely Salem’: (c. 1878). L559.
391 ‘a violence of Affection’: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal, cited by Frances Wilson, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (Faber, 2008), 36.
391 MTB attacks romantic legend: Revelation, 3, 8, 58.
391 ‘vainly’: Sewall, i, 184.
391 ‘in her own way’; reached out: Home, 374–5.
392 ‘the legend …’: Ibid., 373.
392 Montague enforced MTB’s erasure: Montague files: Jackson’s memorandum (14 Oct 1953); Montague to Boston lawyer, Ames (14 Oct 1953); Montague letter (22 Oct 1953) with ‘to contain no mention …’. It was authorised by the Harvard Corporation at this time.
392 ‘compiler’: ‘16 May 1959’. Yale: box 47, f.16.
392 ‘unctuous’: MTB, ‘Veterans Day, 1955’, op. cit.
392 final exchange of Montague and MTB: NYPL: Montague Papers, box 1: Bingham correspondence (14 and 17 Dec 1955).
393 ‘Did Vinnie …’: Yale: box 47, f.14.
393 ‘No’: MTB’s ‘Notes for talk with my father’. DPT died in 1939. MTB died in 1968. Notes typed up with the date Oct 1967. ‘No’ was therefore added during the last year of MTB’s life. Yale: box 47, f.14.
393 ‘that’s where she belongs’: TS memoir, ‘25 May 1959’, op. cit.
393 to probe their grievances: See Clara Pearl to MTB (15 Sept 1932). Yale: box 84, f.258a. Clara was Mrs George E. Pearl, and her mother, the former Anna Newton, was Mrs George H. Carleton. Much of Mrs Pearl’s information came from a memoir of ED and family by Anna’s elder sister Clara Newman (Mrs Sidney Turner). See also Kate Dickinson Sweetser, below.
393 ‘curse on her lips’: MTB, ‘Veterans Day, 1955’, op. cit.
394 taped interviews: Historical Sound Recordings, music section of Sterling Library, Yale. TS transcription of the 1963 interview. Yale: 496D, box 46, f.13.
394 appointed Sewall her literary executor: See ‘the care of Richard Sewall’: MTB, ‘28 July 1964’. Yale: box 46, f.9.
394 ‘set the whole …’: MTB, ‘4–6 Jan 1960’ and ‘7 Feb 1960’. Yale: box 46, f.9.
395 Sewall’s Life of ED: The second volume follows Mabel Todd’s approach in her edition of Dickinson’s letters: they were organised on the basis of assorted recipients (with the earlier correspondences preceding later ones). To see the poet as an amalgam of separate relationships and correspondences was appropriate in 1892–4, at a time when batches of letters were in the process of being collected from Dickinson’s living correspondents who loomed large: their willingness and information were making the edition possible. Eighty years later this approach leaves the poet more elusive than ever.
395 ‘magnetism concealed vindictiveness’: A & M, 67–8.
395 Peter Gay on WAD’s obedience: Senses, 106.
395 SHD cruel and spiteful; ‘hating’: Kaufmann, 109, 226.
395 ‘Borgia Palace’: Afternoons, 98, 103, 105.
396 ‘black velvet; ‘micemeat pie …’: Ibid.
396 false attribution of ‘Her breast is fit for pearls’: Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1998), 9. The copy sent to Sue remained incorrectly placed in the Bowles section in MLT’s 1931 edition of ED’s Letters, 202–3. J84/Fr121.
V: OUTLIVING THE LEGEND
401 The Evergreens in June 2003: I visited the house with a collector of women’s books, Lisa Baskin, and biographers Frances Spaulding and Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina who spoke of ‘a stain seeping through twelve layers of wallpaper’. We were unaware that this was the last month to see the house in its original state.
401 ‘Eternity’s disclosure …’: ‘The Soul’s Superior instants’ (c. 1863). Sent to SHD. J306/Fr630.
401 ‘I’ not herself: (July 1862). L268. ‘When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse — it does not mean — me — but a supposed person.’
401 ‘The Soul that hath a Guest’: (c. 1863). J674/Fr592. Quoted in Part I, above.
401 ‘Immortality as a guest is sacred’: (c. June 1880). L644.
402 ‘The Spirit never twice alike …’: (30 Apr 1882). L750. ED seems to conflate the Spirit with her worship of Lord.
402 ‘priceless’: (c. June 1880). L664.
402 ‘Flash’: ‘The Soul’s distinct connection’ (c. early 1865). J974/Fr901.
402 ‘waylaying Light’: To HH (Sept 1884). L937. ‘The farthest Thunder that I heard’ (c. 1884). J1581/Fr1665.
402 ED’s kinship to Emily Brontë: ED talks of Emily Brontë to Maria Whitney (c. summer 1884). L948. ‘Did you read Emily Brontë’s marvellous verse?’, followed by the stanza beginning ‘Though earth and man were gone’. ED talks of her again as ‘gigantic Emily Brontë’ in letter to Mrs Holland (c. 1881). L742.
402 anything but meek: See, for instance, Brontë’s address to the deity as ‘Comrade’ and ‘slave’ as well as ‘King’ in ‘Oh thy bright eyes must answer now’, Poems (1846). ED owned this volume.
402 ‘Life … vision’: To Whitney (c. summer 1883). L860.
402 ‘I struck the board …’: ‘The Collar’, The Temple (1633).
402 ‘No worst …’: ‘Terrible Sonnets’.
402 infinite ‘thing’: ‘Preludes: IV’ (c. 1912)
402 ‘waste sad time’: Burnt Norton: V (1934–5).
402 an ecstatic: Josephine Hart, deviser of poetry readings by celebrated actors at the British Library. Catching Life By the Throat (London: Virago; NY: Norton, 2007)
402 ‘Take all away …’: (2 Jan 1885). L960.
402 Miss Havisham: MLT imagined ED as a Miss Havisham (from Dickens, Great Expectations) on 15 Sept 1882. Journals, III, 174. Yale: microfilm, reel 8.
403 MH’s dream of The Evergreens as a memorial museum: MH to Montague (17 June 1952). Houghton: bMS Am 1923. In 1991 the house passed to the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Trust. Ownership of the house passed to Amherst College on 1 July 2003.
403 papers: A fantastic collection of papers and memorabilia (deriving from Susan, Ned and Mattie) went to the Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
404 ‘close prest’; ‘little Book’: ‘’Twas the old — road — through pain —’ (c. 1862). J344/Fr376.
404 ‘Impregnable we are’: (c. 1884). L935.
404 ‘Queen of Amherst’: ‘MLT Speaks’ (10 Oct 1931). Yale: 496C, box 10, f.242.
404 ED as queen of immortality: She also calls herself ‘Queen of Calvary’ in ‘I dreaded that first Robin’ (c. 1862). J348/Fr347.
404 queen’s head embossed on stationery: Facsimile edition of The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson. Farr, 189.
404 ring of gems like stars: See ‘Row of Stars’ in ‘I lost a World’ (c. 1861). J181/Fr209.
404 ‘old-fashioned’: See ch. 3, above: ‘I’m so old-fashioned’, said ED at twenty-three.
404 ‘Can Blaze …’: ‘I found the words’ (c. 1862). J581/Fr436.
405 ‘God made me’: (c. summer 1861). L233. The third ‘Master’ letter.
405 ‘Opera’: ‘I cannot dance opon my toes’. See ch. 4, above.
405 ‘Since then …’: Final stanza of ‘Because I could not stop for Death —’ (c. late 1862). J712/Fr479.