Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [221]
79 Wadsworth: See vivid portraits by Benfey, Hummingbirds, 121-2, and Wineapple, White Heat, 71.
79 ‘dark secrets’: Recalled after Wadsworth’s death in 1882 to James D. Clark. L776. Cited by Habegger, 331.
79 ‘Jennie - my Jenny Humphrey . . .’ etc: (16 Oct 1855). L180.
80 ‘g one-to-Kansas’; ‘deathless me’: To Mrs Holland. L182. Cited by Sewall, ii, 466.
80 Mrs Dickinson on the sofa: Pollak and Noble, ‘A Brief Biography’ in A Historical Guide, 23, note her ‘need for more emotional support’ from her husband.
81 ‘My Wheel is in the dark’: Sent to SHD (c. early 1859). J10/Fr61. It’s what Yeats termed the dark of the moon: the inchoate creative act. Eliot called it the ‘first voice’ of poetry (in ‘Three Voices of Poetry’). The poem also speaks of traversing ‘the unfrequented road’, reminding one of Frost’s later choice: the road least travelled by. Vendler, 65, discusses this poem in her essay on ED’s ‘serial plot’.
81 lamp, book: ‘I was the slightest in the House’ (c. 1862). J486/Fr473.
81 ‘Banker’: ‘I never lost as much but twice’ (c. 1858). J49/Fr39.
82 ‘So stationed . . .’: ‘I was the slightest in the House’, op. cit.
82 Chaucer: ‘Truth’.
82 Yeats: ‘A General Introduction to my Work’ (1937).
82 ‘Noteless’; ‘I could not bear . . .’: ‘I was the slightest in the House’, op. cit.
82 ‘shrill morning call’: (24 Dec 1851). L66.
82 dedication to father: ‘Sleep is supposed to be’. J13/Fr35.
82 ‘wild, erratic natures’: ‘The Heart’s Astronomy’. Elaine Showalter, lecture on American women writers (Oxford, 11 May 2006) and A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Ann Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Virago, 2009), 77-80.
83 Samuel Howe and Florence Nightingale: Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 86.
83 ‘troubled . . .’: WAD’s draft of a letter to SHD. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95. Even if he didn’t send a fair copy, this is likely to have been a basis for discussion.
83 The Evergreens: Designed by William Fenno Pratt of Northampton, Massachusetts.
84 Aurora Leigh: Ellen Moers makes connections with ED in Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1978), 55-62, 165-70, 244-5, 285-6.
84 ‘I think I was enchanted . . .’; ‘Foreign Lady’; ‘Mighty Metres . . .’: (c. 1863). J593/Fr627.
84 ED’s hairstyle: Recalled by LD in the 1890s when she rejected the daguerreotype as the appropriate image of ED. LD wrote to her cousin John Graves, ‘Emily and I always wore our hair this way because it was the way Elizabeth Barrett Browning did.’
85 Memoirs of Rachel: By Mme A. de Barrera. Inscribed ‘Emily Dickinson’ by SHD. EDR.
85 ED’s poem on Currer Bell: ‘All overgrown by cunning moss’ (c. early 1860, possibly 31 March, the fifth anniversary of CB’s death). J148/Fr146.
85 not ‘at all like . . .’; trumpet; ‘condensed . . .’: Charlotte Brontë, Biographical Notice to the posthumous edition of her sisters’ works (London: Smith Elder, 1850). Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, ch. 14.
86 ‘more electric . . .’: To Mrs Holland (early May 1883). L822. Mary F. Robinson’s life of Emily Brontë was published in Roberts Brothers Famous Women Series (15 Apr 1883).
86 ‘the Maid in black’: (c. late 1859). L209.
86 Kate Scott Turner: Born in 1831. Married Campbell Ladd Turner in 1855, who died two years later. She and ED corresponded between 1859 and 1866, the year when Kate married John Anthon.
86 ED improvising at the piano: Letter (1914) from Kate Scott Turner (Anthon) to MDB after SHD’s death, recalling that visit. DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
87 ‘Condor Kate’: (c. summer 1860). L222.
87 ‘my girls’ etc: (c. Mar 1859). L203. Written after Kate’s departure on 18 Feb.
87 ‘unnatural evenings’ etc: To Kate Scott Turner (c. late 1859). L209.
87 ‘When Katie kneels . . .’: L208.
88 Emerson at The Evergreens: Sewall, ii, 468. There is no evidence whether ED attended the lecture.
88 The Angel in the House: Popular Victorian poem by Coventry Patmore (Boston, 1856).
88 SHD’s note to ED: DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
89 ‘By such and such . .