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By Root 581 0

impressed with the Todds’ care for scholarship and sympathise with Millicent’s wrongs, which are repeated in all the statements she leaves for posterity and in tapes she made in old age. Like her mother, her voice is measured, careful to be precise, and then too like her mother she believes what she says. Where Mabel believed in her lines with the conviction of an actress, Millicent believed in them as a loyal daughter who had suffered as a child from the snubs of Susan and Mattie Dickinson.

Where Mattie’s legend built up a pitiful Emily bereft, for life, of the one and only man she loved, Millicent’s legend is of a pitiful Emily ‘hurt’, for life, by her ‘cruel’ sister-in-law from whom she withdrew into disillusioned seclusion. As a girl, so the Todd story goes, Susan Gilbert had a ‘lush personality’, charming the innocent Emily, but soon after Susan’s marriage picked Susan out of the ‘gutter’ she began to be above herself. ‘Pretence and pose came to be her most noticeable characteristics,’ Millicent goes on. It was therefore impossible for the intimacy with Emily to survive. ‘Emily grieved.’ To support this, Millicent quotes ‘I lost her’ from a Dickinson poem, without proof that those words referred to Sue. After that, Sue ‘pretended’ to understand Emily ‘better than anyone else’.

Along with Sue, the story dismisses the poet’s sister Vinnie, whom it casts as a grotesque old witch, ungrateful and tight-fisted towards Mabel Todd whom, unaccountably, Vinnie trounced in court. This leaves Mabel Todd as the only worthy intimate of the poet. The price Mabel pays is to ‘be caught’ in ‘the welter of Dickinson animosities’. Millicent deploys the passive verb, in keeping with her mother’s erasure of initiatives on her own part. Mabel Todd had spoken of ‘the family quarrel of endless involutions in which she wished not to become entangled’. Nothing to do with Mabel herself. The A-word has no place in the Todd legend. Instead, an innocent newcomer was ‘involved’, and ‘became the focus of the traditional black passions for revenge which grew by what it fed on. In Mrs. Bianchi[,] the last member of the family[,] it reached a peak of fury . . . which was bent on suppressing any evidence contrary to her purpose - namely to eliminate all trace of one who had presented the poems and letters to the world.’

When it comes to eliminations of Sue’s part in Emily’s letters - tamperings too blatant for cover-up - Millicent takes a bold line. The heart of the matter is not the damage to Sue, as we might suppose. No, the heart of the matter is damage by Sue. It’s Sue’s fault, Millicent claims, because Sue alone was responsible for damage to the Dickinson marriage, forcing Austin to retaliate. The mutilations of the letters intrude on the reader ‘so insistently that he is unable to forget the bitterness of Austin’s life’. As for Emily, this brother’s suffering ‘was her own’. ‘Emily grieved.’ ‘The welter of Dickinson animosities.’ Millicent’s sad voice invites us to share her pity for the poet who had to live with a troublemaker in her family.

‘Emily withered’, the voice insists. Sue’s inability to care for ‘reality’, only for show, ‘left a permanent scar’. Emily’s ‘disillusionment’ with Sue was ‘a positive . . . element in her withdrawal’.

There is no evidence for these allegations beyond Mabel’s say-so, nor is there evidence of Austin as the instigator in the matter of doctored letters. Mabel’s claims to passivity never ring true: for one, that she excluded Susan from her editions of Dickinson’s letters in proper obedience to Austin’s wish.

The legend proliferates in commentaries, biography and, most recently, novels. Most insidious is the assertion that Emily ‘endowed [Sue] with characteristics Sue did not possess’. That being so, Emily’s words of love and praise count for nothing. The force-field of this camp is formidable.

‘Congratulations and hallelujahs’, Millicent had written to Mr Jackson about his acquisition of the other camp’s papers. This hurrah to the Houghton had been well meant. Like the Hampsons, she revered Emily Dickinson.