Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [229]
159 ‘the dear Lords’: L392.
159 enquire: Letters to LD (c. 1875-7), DFP. Houghton: bMS Am 1118.95.
159 granddaughter: Theodora Ward, Harvard Library Bulletin, 98. Ward edited the letters ED sent to her grandparents, and assisted Johnson’s edition of the collected letters.
160 Benfey: A Summer of Hummingbirds, 206.
160 ‘Profile of a Tree . . .’: L645. Fragment with no name attached that was amongst the Lord material. Photograph in Werner, Open Folios.
160 ED’s letters to Lord: Drafts amongst her papers, some fragments, some in pencil, some fair copies. It can’t be assumed with certainty that she sent them in exactly this form as part of their weekly correspondence. One of ED’s drafts was in an envelope addressed in Lord’s hand to Vinnie and sent via Austin’s law office. Presumably Lord’s sister-in-law and niece, who deplored the tie with ED, destroyed ED’s letters after Lord’s death. Lord’s letters to ED were also presumably destroyed along with those of other correspondents. Werner, 47, ‘unedits’ fragments and drafts, and questions the status Johnson gave them as letters. It’s uncertain how MLT came to have this collection, which includes a few fragments that don’t obviously apply to Lord. Werner, stressing textual instability, looks at words as an aesthetic construct on the page. This tends to deflect their specified erotic charge. There is, however, too much circumstantial evidence to fade out ED’s attachment to Judge Lord. Critics who foreground what was undoubtedly an intense tie to Susan are tempted to minimise her attractions to men. In my view she was susceptible to both sexes but with a verbal excitement and abandon that eludes current categories.
160 Abbie Farley: Twenty years later she married William C. West from a leading Salem family.
160 will of Otis P. Lord: AC: MSS 761aa-bb, box 9.
160 ‘Little hussy’: Recalled by Mrs Miriam Stockton, the chief heir of Abbie Farley West (died 1932), talking to MTB in 1936. ED: A Revelation, 23.
160 SHG’s warning against ED to MLT: Note to L757. Source in MLT, ‘Scurrilous but True’ (1932), quoted in Sewall, i, 195. Quoted by MTB, Revelation, 59,
161 ‘Fumigation . . .’: L1041.
161 ‘merciless’; ‘dynamite . . .’: ‘In Memory of Otis P. Lord’ (1884) by the Bar of the Commonwealth and of the Supreme Court at Boston. AC, box 9, f.53.
161 ‘the secret springs of action’; ‘he that becomes master . . .’: The Hon Asahel Huntington Memorial Address to the Essex Institute, Salem (5 Sept 1871). Cited in ED: A Revelation, 44-6.
161 ‘a perfect figure-head . . .’: ‘Annals of Evergreens’ (1892).
162 ED’s courtroom language: (c. 1878). L559.
162 ‘hunger’; ‘Dont you know . . .’ etc: (c. 1878). L562
162 ‘does Judge Lord belong to the Church?’; ‘I had never tried . . .’: (c. 1878). L560.
163 ‘I fear I must ask . . .’; ‘Should you ask . . .’: (Oct 1879). L619.
163 ‘little devices . . .’; ‘glee’; ‘How fleet . . .’: (c. 1881). L695/J1513/Fr1557.
163 ‘sweet Salem’: L751.
164 ‘How could I . . .’: L645.
164 intensified in late summer 1880: Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds, 206.
164 ‘your distant hope’; ‘heavenly hour’; ’unvail’: L645.
164 ‘I have done with guises’: L559.
165 ‘fair home’: L645.
165 racy talk: Obituary recollections by colleagues on the bench. AC. MSS 761aa-bb, box 9.
165 ‘I will not wash . . .’ etc: (1880). L645.
165 prison-house: Wordsworth, ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality’.
165 ‘Ethiop within’: ‘More Life—went out—when He went’ (c. autumn 1862). J422/Fr415.
165 ‘Cobweb attitudes’; ‘such was not. . .’: ‘To hang our head—ostensibly—’ (c. 1859). Fr160 /J105.
165 The Belle of Amherst: By William Booth Luce, with Julie Harris in the role of ED.
165 spoof of ED legend in Being John Malkovich: Noted by Daniel Karlin, reviewing Fr (1999).
165 Joyce Carol Oates, ‘EDickinsonRepliLuxe’: Wild Nights! Thanks to novelist Sheila Kohler for the gift.
166 extraordinarily frank in its strange allusiveness and innuendo: Comment by Isobel Dixon.
166 ‘. . . To write to you . . .’: L750.