Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [219]
48 friction with mother: MLT’s notes on LD’s snippets of memory. Yale: box 82, f.402.
49 failure of friendships: L15.
49 ‘silent’ letters: (23 Jan 1850). L30.
50 ‘Experiment to me’: Sent first to SHD (c. 1865). J1073/Fr1081.
50 accused Jane etc: L81, L86.
50 ED and Shakespeare: Emily Fowler Ford’s recollections of their girlhood for MLT’s edition of ED’s Letters (1894), 129-30.
51 ‘the integrity of the private mind’: Essay: ‘Self-Reliance’.
51 Anne Hutchinson and dissent: Ronald Bush, Oxford lecture on ED (18 Jan 2006).
52 Hawthorne on women’s public utterance: ‘Woman’ in Hawthorne (NY: The Library of America). Amy Lang, Anne Hutchinson and Dissent in New England (Univ of California Press, 1988).
53 ‘the infinitude of the private man’: ‘Self-Reliance’. The source is Emerson’s Journal: ‘In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man . . .’. (7 Apr 1840).
53 gave her Emerson: ED to Jane Humphrey (23 Jan 1850). L30. First edition (1847). EDR.
53 ‘touched the secret Spring’: ED to Judge Otis Lord (30 Apr 1882). L750.
53 ‘stinging rhetoric’; ‘bullets’: Journals (24 June 1840). ED had no access to his journals but, since Emerson repeats his message over and over, she would have picked up these injunctions elsewhere.
53 ‘In silence . . .’: Ibid. (11 June 1840).
53 ‘I tire of shams, I rush to be’: Quoted in Santayana’s essay on ‘Emerson the Poet’, Santayana on America, ed. Richard Colton Lyon (NY: Harcourt, 1968)
54 ‘I shall’: (23 Jan 1850). L30.
54 letter to Joel Norcross: L29 (11 Jan 1850). MLT did not include this in her selection of 1894. It did not fit the Dickinson image she was promoting.
54 ‘a lie . . .’: Habegger, 228, suggests a broken promise.
55 lava and fire associated with feminists of 1848; volcanic cartoon; the Vésuviennes: Bonnie Anderson, ‘Volcano Time’ in Joyous Greetings, ch. 7.
55 ‘No law . . .’: ‘Self-Reliance’.
56 ‘She felt a dangerous power . . .’: Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds, 127.
56 April 1850 letter to Jane Humphrey: L35.
58 ‘married’: (22 June 1851). L44.
58 ‘often wrote’: ED to the Revd Edward Everett Hale (13 Jan 1854). L153.
58 a retrospect on BFN’s message: L153.
58 ‘My dying Tutor . . .’: To TWH (7 June 1862). L265.
58 ‘If I live . . .’: To TWH (1876). L457. In this letter she speaks of BFN as ‘my earliest friend’, and she’s thinking of his death in the context of her father’s ‘lonely Life and his lonelier Death’.
58 ‘Title divine—is mine!’: Sent to SB (c. 1861) and SHD (c. 1865). J1072/Fr194/EDC.
58 ‘Newton is dead’: (27 Mar 1853). L110.
58 ED’s letter to BFN’s minister: L153, op. cit.
59 ‘My life closed . . .’: J1732/ Fr1773. Undated. Transcribed by MLT, who eliminated dashes.
59 ‘boots and whiskers’: To Abiah Root (17 May 1850). L36.
59 ‘Papa above’: (c. early 1860). J10/Fr151.
59 Jacob wrestles: Genesis: xxxiii, 24-32.
59 ‘worsted God’: ‘A little East of Jordan’ (c. early 1860). J59/Fr145.
60 ‘The Soul selects . . .’: J303/Fr409/EDC, op. cit.
60 timely mentor: Charlotte Brontë too had this luck when she became the pupil of M. Heger in 1842-3.
60 ‘new—and small’ etc: J454/Fr455. See p. 34, above. The following paragraph picks up this poem.
3: SISTER
61 did not disguise: Her outcries are similar to Florence Nightingale’s in Cassandra. They have to do with the artifice of women’s assumed character and middle-class ways of life in the mid-nineteenth century. In Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon (London: Viking; NY: Farrar, 2008), 356, Mark Bostridge speaks of an intensity verging on madness.
61 ‘blessed’ night: To Jane Humphrey (3 Apr 1850). L35.
61 ‘in rebellion’: Ibid.
61 ‘the author in me’: draft letter to SHD. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
61 ‘little ninny’: L45.
62 ‘Topknot’ etc: L37. The name is presumably a reference to the topknot of hair worn by high-caste males in ancient Japan.
62 Susan Gilbert’s birth: 19 Dec 1830, nine days after ED. I’m indebted to Martha Nell Smith’s brief biography