Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [222]
90 ‘Fortunate for us . . .’: To WAD. L87.
90 ‘not like us’: L78.
90 SHD’s copy of Goethe: EDR.
90 booklets: Known to scholars as ‘fascicles’, but this word is not ED’s. It was introduced by MLT in 1890 when she co-edited the first selection of ED’s poems, four years after the poet’s death. The booklets are also known as ‘packets’ but this gives the wrong impression. What ED intends is a home-made book of about six pages of notepaper that the author folded and threaded together.
90 ‘One Sister’: (c. 1858-9). J14/Fr5/L197/EDC. The copy sent to SHD (possibly, Johnson suggests, for her twenty-eighth birthday on 19 Dec 1858) was signed ‘Emilie’ and is pasted into MDB’s copy of The Single Hound, the first selection of poems published by MDB in 1914, immediately after her mother’s death.
91 ‘Domingo’: L833, op. cit.
91 ‘the little tippler’: ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’ (c. 1861). J214/Fr207.
91 poem to ‘Dollie’: ‘I often passed the Village’ (c. 1858). J51/Fr41. ED acquired the 1857 edition of Wuthering Heights, which is presumably when she read it.
92 erotic: See Martha Nell Smith, Rowing in Eden, and Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith (eds), Open Me Carefully, who make a strong case for same-sex love. See also EDC.
92 ‘No Words . . .’ etc: (c. 1884). L913.
4: ‘WIFE WITHOUT THE SIGN’
93 ‘Bomb’: ‘I tie my Hat’ (c. 1863). J443. Fr omits the semi-final stanza including the ‘Bomb’ in the breast, which should not be detached from the speaker’s domestic aspect. That would seem to be the point of the poem. Johnson transcribes it correctly.
94 ‘Existence’: Franklin transcribes what looks like a capital E as lower case. ED tends to use capitals for important abstract nouns.
94 ‘Fire . . . gun’: ‘I have never seen “Volcanoes”—’ (c. 1860). J175/Fr165.
94 ‘a quiet—Earthquake style—’: ‘A still—Volcano—Life’ (c. spring 1863). J601/Fr517.
94 ‘buckled’: ‘The reticent volcano’ (n.d. - MS believed lost). J1748/Fr1776.
94 ‘Tell the truth but tell it slant’: (c. 1872). J1129/Fr1263.
94 ‘I am alive I guess’: (c. summer 1863). J470/Fr605.
94 ‘I felt my life with both my hands’: (c. summer 1862). J351/Fr357.
94 ‘twinkled back’: Ibid.
94 He touched me; I groped . . .: ‘He touched me’ (c. summer 1862). J506/Fr349.
94 ‘Rowing in Eden’: ‘Wild nights—Wild nights!’, op. cit.
95 mistake to read . . . literally: Benfey, Hummingbirds, 245, concludes: ‘Her “master letters” seem, in retrospect, experiments in enacting a grand passion on the page.’
95 ‘They were disobedient . . .’: (c. spring 1858). L187. First ‘Master’ letter.
96 ‘Oh did I offend . . .’: L248. Dated by Johnson ‘early 1862’ but now thought to be early 1861. Second ‘Master’ letter.
96 ‘Tomahawk . . .’: Ibid.
96 ‘Fuschzia . . .’ and ‘Cactus . . .’: ‘I tend my flowers for thee’ (c. autumn 1862). J339/Fr367.
96 ED’s weight: MLT, Journals, V (1 Sept 1886). Yale: microfilm.
97 third ‘Master’ letter: L233.
97 ‘nail in my breast’: (c. late May 1863). L281.
97 closer to exercises in composition: Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1985), 24-7: ‘These three letters were probably self-conscious exercises in prose by one writer playing with, listening to, and learning from others.’
97 ‘words obey my call’: ‘Words’, The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910).
98 ‘I cannot dance upon my toes’ etc: (c. 1862). J326/Fr381.
99 ‘Face out of Paradise’: L489.
99 Bret Harte: SB introduced him to the Dickinsons.
99 ‘shaggy manner’: ‘Annals of Evergreens’.
99 SHD’s submission of ‘Nobody knows’: Habegger, 389. J35/Fr11.
99 ‘Has girl . . .’: SHD to ED (n.d.). DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
99 one of Bowles’s earliest letters: Habegger dug up the date of this birth: 15 May 1859.
100 ‘I have made [women] shed many tears’: Cited by Farr, 205, from SB’s biographer, George Merriam (1884): a woman who visited SB’s newspaper in 1865 reported his words.
101 ‘trial . . .’ and ‘torture . . .’: To SHD (26 Feb [1864]).
101 ‘the late flirtatious widow’: To WAD