Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [218]
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).