Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [246]
402 ‘priceless’: (c. June 1880). L664.
402 ‘Flash’: ‘The Soul’s distinct connection’ (c. early 1865). J974/Fr901.
402 ‘waylaying Light’: To HH (Sept 1884). L937. ‘The farthest Thunder that I heard’ (c. 1884). J1581/Fr1665.
402 ED’s kinship to Emily Brontë: ED talks of Emily Brontë to Maria Whitney (c. summer 1884). L948. ‘Did you read Emily Brontë’s marvellous verse?’, followed by the stanza beginning ‘Though earth and man were gone’. ED talks of her again as ‘gigantic Emily Brontë’ in letter to Mrs Holland (c. 1881). L742.
402 anything but meek: See, for instance, Brontë’s address to the deity as ‘Comrade’ and ‘slave’ as well as ‘King’ in ‘Oh thy bright eyes must answer now’, Poems (1846). ED owned this volume.
402 ‘Life . . . vision’: To Whitney (c. summer 1883). L860.
402 ‘I struck the board . . .’: ‘The Collar’, The Temple (1633).
402 ‘No worst . . .’: ‘Terrible Sonnets’.
402 infinite ‘thing’: ‘Preludes: IV’ (c. 1912)
402 ‘waste sad time’: Burnt Norton: V (1934-5).
402 an ecstatic: Josephine Hart, deviser of poetry readings by celebrated actors at the British Library. Catching Life By the Throat (London: Virago; NY: Norton, 2007)
402 ‘Take all away . . .’: (2 Jan 1885). L960.
402 Miss Havisham: MLT imagined ED as a Miss Havisham (from Dickens, Great Expectations) on 15 Sept 1882. Journals, III, 174. Yale: microfilm, reel 8.
403 MH’s dream of The Evergreens as a memorial museum: MH to Montague (17 June 1952). Houghton: bMS Am 1923. In 1991 the house passed to the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Trust. Ownership of the house passed to Amherst College on 1 July 2003.
403 papers: A fantastic collection of papers and memorabilia (deriving from Susan, Ned and Mattie) went to the Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
404 ‘close prest’; ‘little Book’: ‘’Twas the old—road—through pain—’ (c. 1862). J344/ Fr376.
404 ‘Impregnable we are’: (c. 1884). L935.
404 ‘Queen of Amherst’: ‘MLT Speaks’ (10 Oct 1931). Yale: 496C, box 10, f.242.
404 ED as queen of immortality: She also calls herself ‘Queen of Calvary’ in ‘I dreaded that first Robin’ (c. 1862). J348/Fr347.
404 queen’s head embossed on stationery: Facsimile edition of The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson. Farr, 189.
404 ring of gems like stars: See ‘Row of Stars’ in ‘I lost a World’ (c. 1861). J181/Fr209.
404 ‘old-fashioned’: See ch. 3, above: ‘I’m so old-fashioned’, said ED at twenty-three.
404 ‘Can Blaze . . .’: ‘I found the words’ (c. 1862). J581/Fr436.
405 ‘God made me’: (c. summer 1861). L233. The third ‘Master’ letter.
405 ‘Opera’: ‘I cannot dance opon my toes’. See ch. 4, above.
405 ‘Since then . . .’: Final stanza of ‘Because I could not stop for Death—’ (c. late 1862). J712/Fr479.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first debt is to my mother Rhoda Press who, far off ‘at the bottom of Africa’, read Dickinson with an affinity for her visitations (the ‘flash’), sufferings, intense friendships and private oeuvre of poems.
This book goes back to the late eighties when I planned a book of women’s lives. It was to include Emily Dickinson as well as Charlotte Brontë and Minny Temple, cousin to Henry James and model for his American girl. Research on all three began in 1990, and initial findings prompted longer biographies. New York agent Georges Borchardt welcomed a Dickinson proposal in 1999, reshaped in 2005. He offered, as always, support for evolving ideas, together with astute questions and words of wisdom. Virago publisher Lennie Goodings took this on with an infectious commitment to great poetry and to Dickinson in particular. Her inspired editing has made a difference to what emerged, and I’ve been fortunate too in Zoe Gullen who handled the copy-editing and much else with care and judgement. Thanks to London agent Isobel Dixon for her supportive involvement, and to Penguin (NY) publisher Kathryn Court for another decisive acceptance, backed by helpful contributions from co-editor Alexis Washam.
No biography is possible without others