Real-life soap opera behind the publication of ‘america’s greatest poet’, emily dickinson
Emily Dickinson famously wrote
“tell all the truth but tell it slant”. A characteristically enigmatic phrase, it’s both striking and open to multiple interpretations. Did Julie Dobrow, then, deliberately compose her mesmerising account of the discovery, publication and afterlife of Emily Dickinson’s poetry so it comes across as a multi-generational soap opera?
Just giving a précis of her book, After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet, will show what I mean:
In late 1870s Washington, the flirtatious, self-centred Mabel Loomis was courted by David Todd, a young astronomer working at the Naval Observatory. The 20-year-old beauty married him, despite his confession of past sexual “indiscretions”. An ardent diary-keeper, Mabel was soon using special symbols to mark their sexual activity and, in 1880, she gave birth to a little girl, Millicent. When David accepted a teaching position at Amherst College, the family moved to Massachusetts and soon became friendly with the town’s leading family: lawyer Austin Dickinson, his wife, Susan, and their three children, including a shy and epileptic 20-yearold son called Ned. Before long, Ned fell in love with Mabel.
At this time, the Todds also came to know Austin’s two younger sisters, Emily and Lavinia.
David regularly succumbed to further “indiscretions” and Mabel felt more and more drawn to Austin Dickinson, 27 years her senior. Ned grew jealous of his father, Susan became suspicious, the town began to whisper. After Austin and Mabel surrendered to something bigger than themselves, the couple sometimes met secretly at Emily and Lavinia’s home.
Then, in 1886, at the age 55, Emily died. Sometime after the funeral, Lavinia unlocked a drawer brimming with scribbled-on paper scraps, many sewn together in little packets. Over the years Emily had frequently shared poems – at least 250 of them – with Susan, who had been her close, perhaps more than close, friend before marrying Austin. But here were hundreds and hundreds more.
For the next two years, Mabel carefully transcribed Emily’s originals, making no changes to them.
But when she and critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson assembled a selection of poems, they added titles and changed the occasional word to render the work more conventional. Published in 1890, Poems proved to be a surprise success and ran through multiple printings.
Though doing none of the work, Lavinia started to feel wrongly overshadowed by the industrious Mabel. There were squabbles about royalties and other matters. When Austin died in 1895, leaving his lover shattered and unprotected, the entire Dickinson clan attacked her on several fronts, culminating in a trial over a land-gift, which she lost.
If you’re interested in “America’s greatest poet”, intellectual property issues or juicy literary history, After Emily is your book. | The Washington Post