History is crowded with unsung heroines, wives of celebrated but difficult men, who promoted their husbands’ interests, put up with their rages, depressions and vanities, comforted them in bad times and remained discreetly in the background during moments of glory. I often think of these consorts of kings and presidents, great creative artists and spiritual leaders when I am writing about their achievements. Lady Longford, wife of the great philanthropist Frank, Earl of Longford, who devoted a long lifetime to piety and good works, once said to me: “What should the wife of a saint be called? A martyr.”
The martyred wives of the famous stretch back through time, a ghostly procession of largely unknown ladies, patient in eternity as they were in life. There was, for instance, Eleanor of Castile, queen of Edward I, the great crusader warrior, conqueror of Wales, “Hammer of the Scots,” a man of notorious irritability, whose outbursts of bad temper survive in the financial records, thus: “Item, for repairing damage to the crown which the King in his anger did cast into the fireplace.” What of the damage to Eleanor? After her death, the king sought to repair it by having a series of superb stone crosses erected at each stopping place of her body on its journey to burial in London. Some of these “Eleanor crosses” survive, and gazing at them today, one is reminded of what the poor woman endured. Or there is Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, another great warrior, who did everything a wife could do to make her famous spouse happy, even putting up with his mistress, Alice Perrers. The effigy of her matronly form survives in Westminster Abbey, and there is a touching passage in Froissart’s Chronicles describing a repentant Edward shedding tears at her deathbed. Or think of the wife of President Andrew Jackson, plucked from obscurity to marry a supremely difficult, combative and embattled man, only to become (owing to irregularities about their marriage, for which she was blameless) the victim of America’s first great age of political pamphlet warfare. The abuse killed her in the end (as Jackson believed), but before that we have a picture in words of the two, no longer young, sitting on the porch together one evening, smoking their long-stemmed pipes.
There are suffering females attracted to great men in the arts too—Sir Joshua Reynolds’s sister, for instance, who had much of his talent but who was not allowed to practice her art, as he judged it unseemly. Or J. S. Bach’s wife, who bore him a dozen children, remained in the background throughout his long life of perpetual work composing and performing and after his death died in poverty. Mozart’s gifted sister met the same fate. Then there is the case of Anne Hathaway, one of the most familiar of all names but, like Pontius Pilate, attached to an unknown person. She left behind the world’s most famous cottage and inherited Shakespeare’s “second-best bed.” Otherwise—women et preteria nihil. Shakespeare, man of genius, actor-playwright-theater owner, ferociously at work until his early death at fifty-two, cannot have been easy to live with. Was Anne a heroine? We do not know.
One case of a writer’s spouse we do know about, and that is the vexed case of Jane Welsh Carlyle. I say “know” but that is an exaggeration. Tom Stoppard once wisely observed to me: “No one knows exactly what happens inside a marriage except the two combatants themselves.” Jane Baillie Welsh, a doctor’s daughter, was born in 1801, married Carlyle in 1826 and died forty years later in 1866, her husband surviving her by sixteen years. Both were prolific letter writers, and striking ones too, and happily many recipients recognized this and kept them. In 1883 appeared the first collection of Jane’s Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, annotated by Carlyle himself and edited by James Anthony Froude. In the following century appeared many more collections, and since 1970, a new and complete edition of the letters of both has been in the course of publication by Duke University, North Carolina, and Edinburgh University. At the time I write this, thirty-four volumes have appeared, and since only the year 1857 has been reached, at least twenty more are to come. A project on this scale has revealed many new letters never before published. Well over two thousand from Jane alone now exist, an enormous number for a nineteenth-century woman who was not a queen or an authoress or particularly well known in her own right.
For the first time it has become possible to create, if not a full portrait of the Carlyles’ marriage, at any rate an accurate sketch, and thereby to correct a notorious misapprehension. For up till now the Carlyle union has gone down in history as a classic case of a failed marriage between two totally unsuited individuals, each of brilliant gifts, who used them to make the other unhappy. Both have been blamed. As George Meredith put it: “It was so fortunate the Carlyles married each other instead of somebody else. For thereby only two people were made miserable instead of four.” The unhappiness of the Carlyles has also been turned into an instrument for condemning the entire Victorian age, and its concept of marriage in particular.
There are two reasons for this picture emerging. The first is the role of Froude. When, after her death, Jane’s birthday came around, the sad old widower sorted through her letters to him:
such a day’s reading as I perhaps never had in my life before. What a piercing radiancy on meaning to me in those dear records, hastily thrown off, full of misery, yet of bright eternal love; all as if on wings of lightning, tingling through one’s very heart of hearts!…I have asked myself, Ought all this to be lost, and kept to myself, in the brief time that now belongs to me?…As to “talent,” epistolary and other, these letters, I perceive, equal and surpass whatever of best I know to exist of that kind.
The result was the arrangement of Jane’s letters already mentioned. Carlyle also wrote his Reminiscences, in which he described his marriage in detail of a kind which was most unusual for the time. Both manuscripts were handed over to Froude, plus many other papers, and he was appointed Carlyle’s literary executor. His coexecutives were Forster and Carlyle’s brother John, but both died before Carlyle died, leaving Froude in sole charge. Froude was a clever man but also a fool, and an arrogant fool. He published the Reminiscences in two volumes in 1881, Jane’s Letters in 1883 and a full and exceptionally frank biography of Carlyle in four volumes. The first two volumes, A History of the First Forty Years of Carlyle’s Life, appeared in 1882, and the second two, A History of Carlyle’s Life in London, in 1884. These eight volumes in all, based upon unlimited access to the sources, appeared to give an authentic picture of the Carlyles’ life together based on Froude’s quite mistaken view that Carlyle was Oedipus and Jane Iphigenia, and their marriage a classic Greek tragedy. Froude carved this story in stone—or set it in concrete.
Froude’s error was compounded by a piece of mischief making by the late Victorian journalist-fantasist Frank Harris, author of a notorious autobiography, much of it fiction, My Life and Loves. In 1910–11 he published, in the English Review, “Talks with Carlyle,” in which he alleges that the elderly writer, during a walk in Hyde Park, admitted he was sexually impotent, that he and Jane had never had sex together, and that this was one chief source of her misery:
The body part seemed so little to me…I had no idea it could mean so much to her…Quarter of a century passed before I found out how wrong I was, how mistaken, how criminally blind…It was the doctor told me, and then it was too late for anything but repentance.
Harris reinforced this by asserting that Jane’s doctor, Dr. Richard Quain, told him over dinner at the Garrick Club that when he examined her in the 1860s he found she was virgo intacta.
There is no objective evidence that either of these highly improbable conversations ever took place. It is almost certain Harris invented both. Credence was attached to them only because Froude had prepared the way by his “tragic marriage” story. Of course! Here was the missing clue! It is true Jane never had a child. That was not uncommon among Victorian couples. No doubt it was a source of sadness to her. But now we knew why—Carlyle had refused to have sex with her, being unable to do so. He was impotent. It was just like Ruskin and Effie, only worse, for Jane was too noble to seek a divorce on the grounds of non-consummation. But no wonder she hated Carlyle in consequence and sought revenge!
It is all nonsense. There is no evidence Carlyle was impotent. Or that he refused to have sex with his wife. Or that she was virgo intacta. Their sex life was, in all likelihood, normal. We might know more about it if we had the correspondence between Jane and Geraldine Jewsbury, the novelist, who at times was Jane’s best and intimate friend (they also quarreled). They certainly discussed intimate matters in their letters. Unfortunately a Mrs. Alexander Ireland, who edited the Jewsbury letters, cut them ruthlessly and then destroyed the originals. And Jane’s letters to Jewsbury were all destroyed by the recipient. Jane wrote over a thousand letters to Carlyle which sometimes made numerous criticisms of his behavior, but none involve his sexuality or lack of it. As for her taking revenge on him, in nearly ten thousand letters of his to her, “there is never a word of counter-criticism.”
So where does this leave us? What was their marriage really like? And was Jane a heroine or a martyr? The answer, provided by Carlyle’s best modern editors, Kenneth J. Fielding and David R. Sorensen, is that “The Carlyles’ lives were less a classical tragedy than an extensive patchwork rug.” And Jane was too self-reliant, combative and good tempered (as well as bad tempered) to be a martyr, though she has strong claims to heroine status. She married Carlyle after much hesitation, and repeated refusals, well knowing what she was taking on. She came from a higher social class. She was an only child (one of the keys to the whole story). She was beautiful, vivacious, witty, clever and highly articulate, “the best match in her parish.” She married Carlyle because she wanted to marry a genius, and thought he was one. And she was right. She never had any disappointment on that score, and the letters in which she congratulates him on Frederick the Great, his longest, most difficult and agonizing (to both of them) book, is a superb paean of praise, the kind of letter an author longs to get from his wife, and rarely does. He in turn, when he finished the manuscript of The French Revolution, gave it to her and said:
You have not had for a hundred years any book that comes more direct and flamingly from the heart of a living man—do what you like with it, you angel.
Their life was hard. Her life with him was doubly hard. For some years they lived on a remote farm belonging to her, where he learned his craft as a writer. She was lonely, and there was no way in which she could help him. Writers have to learn to write the hard way—by themselves. They were poor, and she had to do menial work. He was an exceptionally difficult man. He once described himself as sitting, surrounded by his thoughts “all inarticulate, sour, fermenting, bottomless, like a hideous enormous Bog of Allan—and I have to force and tear and dig some kind of main ditch through it.” Offered a job in an office, he replied: “I admire your faith that a hungry polar bear, reduced to a state of dyspeptic digestion, may safely be trusted tending rabbits.”
Jane had to live with this hungry, dyspeptic polar bear, sitting in the Bog of Allen of his thoughts, and it was not easy. His upbringing had been abstemious and he was content with the minimal comforts. Hers had been profuse—and she was not. Long after he began to make an ample income, she was obliged to write him a long letter—one of the most brilliant even she ever penned—explaining why she needed more housekeeping money. Being polar bearish, he could not be left to conduct negotiations requiring tact and persuasion. So she interviewed the income tax commissioners on his behalf, and left another scintillating account of it. Bear he might be, but he could be flattered into dancing. Lady Ashburton, wife of the millionaire boss of Baring’s Bank, perceived this, and being the leading hostess, drew him into her circle, and flattered him out of his senses. He paid court in response, and Jane was a touch jealous at times. But Froude enormously exaggerated the depth and intensity and duration of her jealousy. In fact her correspondence shows she was pretty intimate with the lady herself, often stayed at her classical palace, the Grange, in Hampshire, with and without Carlyle, and saw the point of the friendship. When the Lady died, and Ashburton remarried, the second wife became one of her closest friends, and she doted on her ladyship. There was no element of black tragedy there.
There are two points about the Carlyles it is vital to understand. Whatever one may think about Carlyle as a writer, social commentator and historian, there can be no doubt about one thing: he was a grumbler of genius. He began well as a young man, looking for literary work, and continued to hone his skills to the end of his long life. Scotland, England, Edinburgh, London, people in general, thousands of individuals in particular, Whig governments, Tory governments, all governments, the upper classes, the middle classes, the working classes—inventions, railways, steamships, the Great Exhibition, foreign policy, Corn Laws, abolishing Corn Laws, progressives, reactionaries—Disraeli, Palmerston, Gladstone—all these and countless other subjects stimulated his grumbling propensities and his curmudgeonly rhetoric. He grumbled about the weather, the cold, heat, rain, snow and wet; about every variety of noise; about his sleeplessness and digestion; about his head, heart, lungs and stomach. He found fault with every book he read, he carped at every visitor, he groused at the newspapers, moaned at politics, grouched at the queen, muttered against the law, bitched at foreigners—and snarled at children. Friends made him choleric, enemies even crosser; he growled at himself too.
Moreover, like his style of writing—the most infectious ever known—his cantankerousness was catching. Jane caught it. She became a grumbler of genius too—and she added a whole new range of subjects, especially servants: idle servants, drunken servants, thievish servants, carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers, men who came to mend stoves, to lay floors, to put up curtains. Postmen. Cabdrivers. Delivery men. Shopkeepers. Guests. Dinner parties. Evening parties. Tea parties. Italian revolutionaries. German historians. Relations. Society women. People who dropped in. She competed with Carlyle’s grumbling out of a spirit of self-preservation, then for success, then for the sheer pleasure of it. Again, Carlyle was a hypochondriac, and his ailments, real or imaginary, were a central part of his grumbling mania, especially his gastroenteritis, dyspepsia, headaches, palpitations and all the things that caused them: food, “made dishes,” vegetables, meat, fish—anything he ate, in fact; and lack of food, and things he didn’t eat. He grumbled about his sleeplessness and the things that caused that: street musicians, people who kept chickens, cocks crowing, dogs barking, people shouting or singing or just walking the streets. His hypochondria was also catching, and Jane caught that as well. Gradually as she processed through life, her headaches became more frequent, lasting and painful; she caught cold more often, and her colds took longer to go away. Events prostrated her, servants turned her frantic, workmen drove her to the brink of madness, suicide, total misery. The Carlyles competed more and more persistently, industriously and imaginatively in the oratory of their ailments, the epistolary glory of their discomforts—and doubtless in their daily, unrecorded exchanges still more. Two first-class hypochondriacs, both grumblers of world quality, living in close proximity or, if apart, exchanging ferocious letters daily—huge, quotidian salvos—it is a formula for something rich and strange. But not necessarily unhappiness.
Moreover, there was a redeeming quality. Humor. Beneath Carlyle’s iracund and peevish crust, there smoldered inextinguishable embers of savage jocosity. The humor was black. It was not far removed from rage. But it was strong, and tongues of humorous fire licked over the glowing coals of his complaints, sometimes leaping out high or exploding in a shower of infernal sparks. He could make Jane laugh, and did, often. She too had a powerful streak of humor. She was a natural raconteur. She could take a character coming to their Chelsea house and transform him into a comic turn, script his utterances with delicate vernacular details and mime his gestures and faces. Or she could turn a tiny domestic incident into an episode in a comic saga: “The Servant Problem,” “Workmen Who Won’t Work,” “The Horrors of Chelsea,” and so on. She liked to work up these contes into superb anecdotes that, at the end of the day, when Carlyle emerged from his desperate struggles with his Frederick the Great, she could perform for him and see his grim, craggy features relax into a smile, or even detonate a great snort of granitic laughter. She could turn these tales into the stuff of letters too. Dickens believed she could have been a great writer. I doubt that. What we have of prose from her, not much more than scraps, is not impressive. But letters were another matter. She talked to the recipient, and became herself in the spluttering pen-shaped words, so that you can hear her firm, rapid, Scotch voice, tumbling over itself with the grim joy of her tale, and shimmering with ironies, sarcasm and comic rage and contempt. Carlyle adored her letters. It is evident from the vast number he wrote to her how vital they were to his peace of mind, his ability to work, his sheer sanity. If one failed to arrive as expected, he was distraught, and he really reckoned on getting one every day he was separated from her.
Jane’s heroism emerges powerfully from her letters, both those directed to her God-master-genius-love object, who needed to be amused; and those to intimate friends to whom she could present God obliquely, as monster-tyrant or unfathomable presence. It is hard to convey, summarily, the sheer delight of Jane Carlyle as a letter writer. The effect is cumulative, as the reader begins to grasp her talent for emphasis, her speech rhythm in prose, her virtuosity in persiflage and the patterns of her diatribes and divine grumbles. The selection made by Fielding and Sorensen is an excellent introduction.
In short, it is impossible to do justice to them without endless quotation: they must be read. But here is a characteristic selection of subjects among which she bounced, dodged and darted—the epistolary stand-up comic getting fun, rage and tragic comedy out of a vast range of topics. Thus: Horrible Samuel Rogers. Pimple on her nose at Lady Ashburton’s party. Grotesque bare backs in the Ballroom. Cheering up the persecuted Lady Bulwer-Lytton. Pentonville Prison—ugh! Great Exhibition disaster. Dreadful life at The Grange. Chaos at Cheyne Walk. Carlyle nearly falling off a mountain. Noises in Chelsea! Ruskins and their divorce—horrors! Carlyle and the Housekeeping Money row. The Hateful Mrs. Gaskell. Buttoning up George Eliot. Bulwer-Lytton rows. “Skittles” putting the Grand Duke in his place. Telling servant how to handle Carlyle. Darwin and the monstrous Origin of Species. Dog run over. New baby. Cat’s attempts to eat her canary. Donkeys! Noises! Servants! Tea parties and their trials. Dreadful inarticulate young male visitor wastes her time.
Many of Jane’s precious (to us!) letters were carelessly discarded or deliberately burned. The Victorians were great creators—and destroyers—of letters. But hundreds of new ones have been found since the Duke-Edinburgh project began forty years ago, and more turn up all the time. I salute Jane the heroic entertainer. But there is a somber theme that runs through her correspondence too: not the difficulties with Carlyle, which she could cope with, and did, but her health. Because in the end, she was not a hypochondriac at all. The problems with her health were real, and they gradually grew worse. Her death in 1866, while out in her carriage, was sudden and instant, but cannot have been unexpected to her. She was a brave soul, and ought to be a heroine among those to whom the tragic comedy of domestic life is the stuff of great drama.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), the reclusive poetess of Amherst, Massachusetts, is a heroine, like Jane Carlyle, for many women, especially writers, but for quite different reasons. Her life was a successful struggle against fear, in which she drew nourishment from her creative gifts. She produced 1,775 poems, nearly all short, that have survived, but only seven were published in her lifetime, all without her permission. Though writing poems was a protection against fear, publication of them, to her, was a gross intrusion on her privacy, a rape, or an act like going naked into a drawing room.
The fear was instinctive, natural and lifelong, and sprang from two causes: her religion and her parents. She, like her family, was Calvinist and believed in double predestination. She, like her mother, but unlike her father, believed from an early age that she was “saved,” and took Communion, on occasion, without difficulty. Religion pervaded her life, but it is not clear whether she believed in God, at any rate in a benevolent, merciful and loving God. She thought God was unjust and cruel, especially to Moses, in not letting him see the Promised Land: she wrote three indignant poems on this subject (Fr. 521, 179, 1271). She was terrified by the story of Elisha and the forty-two mocking children, whom God killed by the agency of two she-bears. She first learned this in verse from Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs for Children, and later commented: “I believe the love of God may be taught not to seem like bears.” These were not mythical creatures to her: children had been killed by bears in Massachusetts within living memory. The grizzly was a real monster to her. But she said that the verse in the Bible that most frightened her was “from him that hath not, shall be taken even that he hath.” The most important word in her life was “power.” She used the word often, and associated it with God, who exercised power for good and evil. Death, especially from tuberculosis and scarlet fever, was common in her age group. Her uncle Asa Bullard edited (in the 1830s) a children’s paper, the “Sabbath School Visitor,” designed to convert children to religious enthusiasm by emphasizing the imminence of sudden death, physical dismemberment and fatal illness. She later wrote:
I can wade grief
Whole pools of it
I’m used to that
(312)
She was also brought up on the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, which she found horrible. But she did not believe his teaching. In fact, she disbelieved a lot. When she asked: “Who made the Bible?” and was told: “Holy men moved by the Holy Ghost,” she compared this answer with what grown-ups said about Santa Claus. She knew God possessed power but she had a skeptical view of the power that parents exercised as God’s vicars over her:
They shut me up in Prose
As when a little girl
They put me in the Closet
Because they liked me “still”—
Still! Could they themselves have peeped—
And seen my brain—go round—
They might as well have lodged a Bird
For Treason—in the Pound
Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Look down upon Captivity
And laugh—No more have I
But if her parents had no godlike power over her, they could keep her in fear, if only by the contagion of their own fears. Her mother was in a constant quiver of anxiety, always terrified of losing her purse, her sewing, her luggage, her way. She used to say: “When in doubt, don’t go out.” She was a poor creature: “I never had a mother,” said Emily later. Her father was far from a nonentity. Like his father, he was much involved, financially and in other ways, in the foundation of Amherst College and its governance, and in the schools associated with it. But his belief that he was not (yet) “saved” led to a fear that he would die thus, and so be separated from those he loved for eternity. This fear dominated his life, and he passed it on. But he filled Emily with physical fears too. She recalled in her fifties that he had taken her to the mill to get grist, and warned her about the powerful mill horse: “Do not get out [of the wagon] and go near the horse, or you will be trampled.” She added: “The horse looked round at me, as if to say, ‘Eye hath not seen, nor Ear heard the things that I would do to you if I weren’t tied.’”
Her father was involved in the state legislature, and so away a lot; and later he served a term in Congress, in the House, and so in Washington. When he was away his family, and especially Emily, were told to observe many restrictive rules, which limited their movements. She was not allowed to go to school if it was cold; no sledding; no play in the snow. Her father had a terror of drafts, of being struck by lightning and of sudden sickness. He and his sister-in-law Lavinia, who lived with them, were both hypochondriacs and valetudinarians, and kept files of remedies for dysentery, cholera and “swallowing forensic acid by mistake,” though they often quarreled violently about what to do in an emergency. Edward Dickinson’s letters are full of advice about and formulas for health. Staying at home, preferably in bed, was a sovereign remedy. He believed himself to be prone to accidents, and was terrified of what would befall his family if they left the house, especially if he was not there. When away, he told Emily: “Never go out, and lock all doors at all times.” His instructions to Emily when she had to go on a visit by train, were disturbing: “When you come home be careful to get out of the car at Palmer—don’t fall, keep hold of something all the time, till you are safely out—lest they should start, and throw you down, and then run over you.” He had a particular fear of her going to a prayer meeting in the vestry, which was a basement: “My positive instruction is that you do not go into the vestry, on any occasion, for any purpose, in my absence. Now don’t disregard this. I shall find it out if you do. It is a most dangerous place, and I wonder that anyone will venture into it.” He also gave her constant instructions about avoiding snakes. She later wrote:
I was much in the woods as a little Girl. I was told that the snake would bite me, that I might pick a poisonous flower, or Goblins kidnap me, but I went along and met none but Angels, who were far shyer of me than I could be of them.
She referred to such episodes under the heading “When I was a boy,” seeing herself thus, and she wrote of the snake:
He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too Cool for Corn
Yet when a Boy and Barefoot—
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip last
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled and was gone.
(1096B)
Her life was spent between two large houses in Amherst with spacious rooms and big gardens, a touch of Charles Addams perhaps. At Amherst Academy, she read Paradise Lost, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and Cowper’s The Task; she did the Aeneid in Latin—her textbook survives. She did botany, and geology, which she liked very much, relishing the image of the hills pushing up (“The mountains grow unnoticed”); she also did history, philosophy, algebra, geometry and theology. She was allowed to attend lectures at Amherst College, and had a year (1847) at the Mount Holyoke Seminary. She was described as a twelve-year-old: “a very bright but rather delicate and frail-looking girl; an excellent scholar; of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties; but somewhat shy and nervous. Her compositions were strikingly original, and in both thought and style seemed beyond her years, and always attracted much attention in the school and, I am afraid, excited not a little envy.” But she did not like school any more than anyone else; thus, at “Noon on Saturday”:
From all the jails the Boys and Girls
Ecstatically leap—
Beloved only Afternoon
That Prison doesn’t keep—
They storm the Earth and stun the Air
A Mob of solid Bliss
Alas—that Frowns should wait
For such a Foe as this
(1553)
Her school records reveal tiny, neat handwriting, a sixty-six-page book of pressed flowers. She commented on this:
I pull a flower from the woods—
A monster with a glass
Computes the stamens in a breath—
And has her in a “class”
(117A)
It is a curious fact that she continued to refer to herself as a “girl” or a “little girl” (as well as a “barefoot boy”) well into middle age.
Her year at Mount Holyoke did her no good. She was one of 235 students. They rose at six and every minute of the day had to be accounted for. She worked hard, but the quality of the teaching was poor and she was disappointed, especially by the prominence of religion. She made no lasting friendship. And she was homesick. After that, she never left Amherst except for brief trips. She does not seem to have considered a career. She never came close (like Jane Austen) to getting married. There were men in her life she called her “tutors.” The first was Benjamin F. Newton, a student in her father’s law firm, who put her on to books and encouraged her to write poetry. He died young. Then there was the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a Philadelphia preacher, whom she called “my dearest earthly friend,” and who taught her that what mattered in religion was not dogma but the feelings. She corresponded with T. W. Higginson of the Atlantic Monthly about literary matters, and, in addition to these three, she showed some of her poems to Helen Hunt Jackson, Dr. J. G. Holland and Samuel Bowles. She read continuously. She liked Longfellow’s Kavanagh, about New England village life, as her annotations in her copy show. She was impressed by Jane Eyre in 1851. (The identity of “Currer Bell” was not then known for sure.) Returning the borrowed copy, with a gift of flowers, she wrote: “If all these leaves were altars and on every one a prayer that Currer Bell might be saved—and you were God—would you answer it?” She also wrote, when the identity of Charlotte Brontë was revealed:
Oh, what an alternative for Heaven,
When “Bronte” entered there!
(146)
Reading Jane Eyre coincided with her acquisition of her first and only dog, a Newfoundland, Carlo, and these events seem to have given her self-confidence in writing. Her brother noted: “She is rather too wild at present.” A valentine (not for herself to send) survives from this time:
Mortality is fatal
Gentility is fine
Rascality, Heroic
Insolvency sublime.
(2)
It is worth noting that legal terminology, picked up from her father’s remarks about his work, makes a curiously persistent appearance in her poetry, not least references to people going bankrupt—as several members of her family did. It is a disturbing image. Another is the railroad.
I like to see it lap the miles
And lick the valleys up—
(383)
But it is probably impossible to construct an accurate chronological account of Emily’s poetic development: the specific evidence is not there. Her poems are on particular themes but not limited as a rule to particular events in her life. They seem of more universal application. This one, for instance, might be categorized “On getting the right book at the right time”:
He ate and drank the precious Words—
His spirit grew robust—
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust—
He danced along the dingy Days
And this bequest of Wings
Was but a Book—what Liberty
A loosened Spirit brings
(1593)
But “He” was not a person.
Commentators have stressed the loneliness and tension of Emily’s life in the Addams House/Mansion/Fortress. Her father had black moods, when his daughter had to be silent and walk warily. But Emily called home “a bit of Eden,” “a holy thing,” and wrote: “Nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals.” At times it was a lively place. Her father might object to her wide reading. But he did not stop her having “reading parties.” There were guests in the home, visitors, noisy gatherings. One eyewitness wrote: “These celestial evenings in the Library—the blazing wood fire—Emily—the music—the rampant fun—the inextinguishable laughter, the uproarious spirit of our chosen—our most congenial circle.” Emily at the piano “played weird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration. Oh, she was a choice spirit.” These gatherings, however, usually took place not at the Dickinson home, but the house next door, and at a certain point, Emily’s father would appear with a lantern to escort her home, though it was only a few yards away.
But she preferred to sit at home writing while the others were out. It gave her, she said, “the old king feeling.” It was “the brimful feeling,” which social intercourse diminished. It is also true that the more seriously she took her poetry, the more she wrote, the more it moved to the center of her life, the less she wanted to see people.
In the late 1850s she decided she was a “working poet” and that her vocation in life was to write. She began copying her poems from the scraps of paper on which they were originally written, and preserving them in hand-sewn booklets. In the years 1858–1865 she made forty of these compilations, and ten unsewn volumes of them, a total of eight hundred poems. Many others must have been rejected as inferior or not worth preserving. All were kept private. She thought feminine self-respect damaged by publicity. She said to a woman who had published her verse: “How can you bear to print a piece of your soul?” She did not object to criticism but did not need it: she could survive on the occasional word of encouragement:
A little bread, a crust—a crumb,
A little trust, a Demijohn—
Can keep the soul alive—
Not portly—mind!
But breathy, warm—conscious.
Such things as recognition, success, did not apply to her:
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need—
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the flag today
Can tell the definition so clear of Victory—
As the defeated—dying
On whose forbidden Ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonised and Clear.
(112A)
She did, however, write a poem about fame, but only one:
Fame of myself, to justify,
All other Plaudit be
Superfluous—An incense
Beyond necessity—
Fame of Myself to lack—Although
My name be else supreme—
This were an Honor horrorless
A futile Diadem.
(481)
This was written during the Civil War, an event which made little impression on Emily, though there is some evidence she felt the war empowered her and certainly 1863 was her most productive year. She was impressed by the dead: “So many brave—have died this year—it don’t seem lonely—as it did—before Battle began.” She added: “I myself sang off Charnel Steps. Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous” (Letters, 298; December 1862). Here is the poem rate for the war years: 1861, 88; 1862, 227; 1863, 295; 1864, 98. Sometimes she wrote two poems in a day.
If the war left her (apparently) unmoved, so did women’s rights. When Bowles said women should appear more in public life, she laughed. Then she apologized: “I am sorry I smiled at Women…My friends are very few. I can count them upon my fingers and, besides, have fingers to spare. I am gay to see you—because you come so scarcely, else I had been graver!” She was terrified by the possible withdrawal of friendship, but sometimes provoked it: letters from her have been described as “snake bites.” The possible—or actual—death of friends sent her into paroxysms of fear:
What shall I do—it whimpers so—
This little Hound within the Heart
All day and night with Bank and Start.
(237A)
Much of her poetry is mysterious, to me, at any rate; and I am skeptical of those who interpret it confidently. There is a fiercely self-destructive poem, calling on fate to “amputate my freckled heart” (Emily was red haired, with freckles on face, hands and arms). She writes of “a Tomahawk in my side.” There are sea poems on drowning:
Two swimmers wrestled on the Spar
Until the morning sun—
When one turned, smiling, to the land—
Oh God! the other One!
The stray ships—passing—spied a face
Upon the water borne,
With eyes, in death, still begging—raised
And hands—beseeching—thrown.
(227A)
Is this herself? Who knows. There is another poem:
Title divine—is mine!
The Wife—without the Sign!
Acute degree—conferred on me—
Empress of Calvary!
(194A)
She called her dog, Carlo, “my mute confederate,” and his death, after sixteen years, was a blow. The mature, middle-aged Emily is an elusive figure. She had trouble with her eyes, and sometimes banned herself from reading. She had rheumatism. Her life in the big house was one of comparative privilege. Her father’s net worth in 1868 was $47,800: a lot. He was the last person in Amherst to be called “squire.” She was described as “a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair…in a very plain and exquisitely clean pique and blue net worsted shawl.” One article of her clothing survives: a white cotton dress. She rejected fashion. She rejected many visitors too. Those who saw her often used the word “childlike.” She presented them with a flower which she called “an introduction.” Sometimes she would talk to visitors only through a half-open door, she herself remaining invisible. She might communicate through sybilline notes. She wrote: “Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers, and hardly know what I say.” In fact she had considerable power of personality, which she evidently cherished and relished. One visitor commented: “I never was with anyone who drained my nerve-power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.” Others remembered her as fresh, direct, fascinating. Like a sybil, she had rituals, and was often invisible, but spoke. A visitor trying the handle of the back door was likely to hear her quietly turning the key in the lock. In her last fifteen years she exchanged messages with the locals, who never saw her. Her notes are marked by irony, superiority. They are dry. The claws are never quite sheathed. She often wrote poetry in the cool quiet of the stillroom, making butter and cheese. But if her father tried to force her to go to church, she would take refuge in the cellar, sitting in a rocking chair. Her image of personal liberty was a key in a locked door. She said, performing “her pet gesture of bravado,” twisting an imaginary key, “It’s just a turn—and freedom.” Denying people, not publishing her poems became almost as important as writing them. Once, her outspoken friend Helen Hunt asked her to explain an enigmatic poem Emily had given her. There was no answer. Hunt flared out: “You are a great poet, and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud. When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy.”
She became ill in November 1885 and died the following May. At her funeral Emily Brontë’s poem “No Coward Soul Is Mine,” one of her favorites, was read. She was said to have “looked thirty, not a grey hair or wrinkle.” Most of her letters were destroyed. Poems by Emily Dickinson was published in 1890, and quickly went into seven editions. Thereafter followed a long publishing history, and countless books. The best, in my view, is by Alfred Habegger: My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, published in 2001, and I have been guided by it in this account. I have also used the three-volume scholarly edition of her poems published in 1955 and her three-volume Letters (1958). Emily’s work should not be overrated. Some of it is mere Christmas-cracker stuff, or the kind of smart-wit poetry produced by Dorothy Parker, who had a lot in common with Emily. The best is sublime, moving, unforgettable, magic, and the woman who produced it is undeniably, in her obstinate, tiresome, brave, unflinching, desperate and triumphant way, heroic.