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David Todd too prodded his daughter when she visited him in the asylum. ‘Are you going to sit by and do nothing, while the work on which your mother spent years is pirated and her name erased from the title-page?’

It was ‘pi-racy’, Millicent agreed in her somewhat Southern tones, retained from her first years in Washington. The journal American Literature invited Millicent to review the Life and Letters. ‘It ought to be done, to point out the villainy of the thing,’ Millicent commented to Amy Lowell. She did not, however, wish to appear ‘in controversy with Mrs Bianchi; the butt of anything she chose to say. And as Walter puts it, “a wise person does not thrust his arms into a barrel of pitch if he knows it.” So, as on previous occasions I must just be a good child, and sit passive, and boil with rage inside.’

Mabel herself fired a long volley of denunciation for Millicent’s benefit. ‘In so far as one conveys the impression that one did the work on a book when in reality it was somebody else, it is piracy. When there is misrepresentation of facts, it is falsehood, deception, perjury, fraud, deceit, sham, pretence, perfidy, distortion invention, dishonesty, treachery, counterfeit, fiction, myth, humbug, hyperbole, swindle. Fortunately through it all Emily remains inviolate. No matter how loudly chanticleer proclaims lies from the roof to the entire barnyard, it does not affect the sun.’

Millicent’s sympathy for her mother in defeat endeared her to Mabel, who turned to her daughter as never before. It’s a bond Millicent had craved with pent-up passion. If she, Millicent, could only protect her mother, if she could be all-important to her and not an onlooker, they might act as one.

It’s a long journey in the Buick from Florida to New England. In November 1924 Mabel makes for the ‘barn’ in Amherst where she’d left her Chinese chest. Millicent is at her side, supporting her lame arm. There in the barn, unseen by the world, an extraordinary scene takes place as mother and daughter kneel beside the chest a quarter of a century after Mabel locked it. As the lock turns a little bell rings (a precaution in case of a thief). Then the lid is thrown back and Millicent gazes at Mamma’s secret ‘mine’: a mass of brown envelopes filled with Dickinson poems and letters.

‘We extracted the Emily things from the barn,’ she confides to Amy Lowell, ‘and today we have been looking them over. They are simply superb! A mine which it would be thrilling to explore. And letters from Mr Higginson and other . . . literary jackasses, who “advised strongly” against publishing anything of Emily’s whatever. And in spite of all, Mamma persisted and worked away at it and brought her to light . . . Now I feel better! What an orgy we shall have when . . . M[artha] D[ickinson] B[ianchi] steps out [dies] some day!’

In 1926 Millicent Todd Bingham will publish her translation of Principles of Human Geography by Vidal de la Blache, who had taught her generation to look to the physical environment - steppes, savannah, forest - to explain the character of its inhabitants. This will be Millicent’s last publication in the field of geography, followed by her last stint of teaching: a course on urban geography at Columbia University. In mid-career Millicent resolves to abandon her field for her mother’s sake. Her idea is not so much to take care of her mother but to take up her cause.

16

THE BATTLE OF THE DAUGHTERS

By the late twenties the daughters of the feud were ready to surrender their independence as geographer and novelist. The battle for Emily Dickinson absorbed both from now on. They were evenly matched.

Mattie had the advantage of the Dickinson name and never stopped wielding it. ‘My aunt, Emily Dickinson’ was the refrain of her letters to her publisher, Houghton Mifflin. She was determined to preserve her legitimacy as sole Dickinson authority.

Millicent’s advantage was her eloquent mother who opened the flood-gates of memory to her daughter. But Mabel Todd still said nothing