Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [220]
62 Thomas Gilbert’s bankruptcy: MLT in ‘MLT Speaks’ (1931), who was bent on slander and whose testimony can’t therefore be trusted, says that SHD’s brother, Dwight Gilbert, paid the town for their father’s upkeep in the ‘poorhouse’. There is no other evidence, so far, that he was ever in a poorhouse, and the allegation is likely to have been part of MLT’s claim that SHD had despicable origins.
64 Again . . . ‘in love’: In the same way she’d been ‘in love’ with her teachers at school. It could be more than a crush but less than acknowledged lesbian love. There were elements of romantic ardour in nineteenth-century attachments - Dorothy Wordsworth’s for her brother, Tennyson’s for Arthur Hallam, Charlotte Brontë’s for Ellen Nussey - that don’t fit sexual labels because the demonstrativeness and the declarations of love were largely emotional.
64 ‘little world of sisters’; ‘sainted Mary’: L38.
64 Vinnie’s diary: For 1851. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
65 ‘You won’t cry . . .’: L88.
65 ‘stupid’, ‘I fancy . . .’: L56.
65 would not permit anything to blossom: L92.
66 favourite passage in Shirley: unspecified, alas.
66 ‘Dollie is stuffed with sawdust’: (8 June 1851). L42.
66 ‘For our sakes . . .’: To WAD (29 June 1851). L45.
67 men’s clothes and ‘P.O.M. Meetings’: SHD, ‘Amherst Half a Century Ago’.
67 Lyman and the Dickinsons: Habegger’s well-researched account, 184-7.
68 Vinnie’s kisses: The Lyman Letters; Habegger, 185.
68 Hester Prynne’s hair: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
68 WAD ‘long fainting . . .’: Draft letter to SHD, after spring 1853. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
68 WAD as schoolmaster: Spring 1851 until summer 1852. After that read law in father’s office until he entered Harvard Law School in spring 1853.
69 WAD’s comic virulence: L43.
69 ‘Lady Susan’: (24 July 1850). WAD goes in for this fantasy in a letter of condolence to Sue on the death of her sister. Houghton.
69 ‘very high style of rapture’: To WAD (22 June 1851). L115.
69 Martha’s eyes alight: (Sept 1851). L52.
70 drafts of WAD’s letters to Martha Gilbert: Home, 162. After forty years he gave them to MLT, who passed them on to her daughter.
70 ‘She thinks a great deal . . .’: (11 Nov 1851). L62.
70 ‘I give all your messages . . .’: (15 Dec 1851). L65.
70 Amity Street: The vicinity of Amherst Academy and Amherst House, where Sue had lived with her parents from the ages of two till six, and where the Todds would board on their arrival in the early 1880s.
70 ‘You and I . . .’: L93.
71 ‘hard heart of stone’; ‘a big future’: L85.
71 plantain leaf in herbarium: Herbarium, 56. In her Preface, Judith Farr notes that ED’s arrangement of her botanical finds provides ‘a kind of colloquy among specimens’.
72 ‘I so love to be a child’: To Abiah Root (c. late 1850). L39.
72 crack time away; ‘I need her . . .’: L85.
72 ‘Has it occurred to you . . .’: A&M, 85.
73 volume of Poems: SHD had dated it Jan 1853.
73 ‘some punkins’; ‘I am really lonely . . .’: A&M, 85.
74 ‘On this wondrous sea’: J4/Fr3. Preceded only by ED’s two valentines, this is the earliest serious poem to survive.
74 Sue . . . appreciated Mr Dickinson: ED’s report to WAD (16 May 1853), saying that their father felt Sue appreciated him more than almost anyone else. L123.
75 ‘Forgive me now Mattie . . .’: DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95. The word ‘spoiled’ is unclear.
75 WAD’s capacity for hero worship: SHD, ‘Annals of the Evergreens’.
76 ED advised WAD: L65.
76 pure and terrible: See opening paragraph of ch. 1.
76 ‘affliction’; ‘Micawber’: L49.
76 ‘Sue has eaten broth . . .’: L167.
77 ‘Sue - you can go . . .’: L173.
78 ‘How did Sue look?’ etc: ED to SHD. L177.
78 women without dowries: the Wollstonecraft sisters, the Brontë sisters, MLT, the Temple sisters are some examples of those who did not expect to marry or who faced the difficulty.
78 Mr Cratchett’s: At the corner of 6th and D streets. Houghton Mifflin to MDB (1 May 1930). Houghton: bMs