Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [257]
Daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson at the age of sixteen. Her sister thought hers a ‘startling’ face. Her brother said that she ‘saw things directly and just as they were’. The ‘only kangaroo’ amongst beauties, Dickinson declared herself.
Mary Lyon, founder of Mount Holyoke, the first college for women. Emily Dickinson was there 1847-8. The date coincides with the declaration of women’s rights at Seneca Falls, but she found herself beset with coercive fundamentalism.
Professor Edward Hitchcock was an early supporter of Miss Lyon and women’s education. He was also the author of Emily Dickinson’s geology textbook, a source for her volcanic images.
Broodingly handsome Austin Dickinson, the most eligible bachelor in town.
Thoughts of men turned Susan Gilbert to ‘stone’, so her friend Emily perceived, yet she wanted Sue to be her ‘Sister’. Sue looks gravely uneasy in this wedding photograph (1856). ‘. . . Bridalled—Shrouded—in a Day’, Emily came to see marriage from a woman’s point of view.
The Dickinson Homestead on Main Street, Amherst. Below: The Evergreens, next door.
Eminent Boston physician James Jackson, whom Emily Dickinson consulted at the age of twenty in 1851.
Her conservatory.
The poet’s writing table (18 inches square) in her bedroom.
Beautiful Lavinia Dickinson in the 1860s, abandoned by the unstable man she’d loved with demonstrative ardour.
Mabel Loomis Todd, a talented young beauty from Washington, DC. She observed that every man she met wanted to make love to her.
David Peck Todd soon after his arrival at Amherst College.
Austere Austin Dickinson in his fifties. As the leading citizen of Amherst, he was called ‘the Squire’, as was his father before him.
Summer 1882: Austin and Sue Dickinson’s children in the briefly harmonious glow of Mabel’s entry into their home and family. Back left, Mabel; front, left to right, Ned (in love with Mabel) and Mattie (Mabel’s music pupil). Inset: little Gib Dickinson, whom the poet called ‘our’ child.
‘Condor Kate’. In the late
1850s the poet welcomed
Kate Scott Turner as a
secret sharer.
Intimates of Sorts
Newspaper owner Samuel
Bowles, who published a few
of the poet’s best works and
was a leading candidate for
the correspondent she calls
‘Master’. ‘You have the most
triumphant face out of
paradise,’ she told him.
Unhappy wife Mary Bowles.
Judge Lord of the
Massachusetts Supreme
Court. He teased the thin
poet as ‘Emily Jumbo’ after
the famous elephant in
Barnum’s circus. She teased
him back with a better name:
‘Emily Jumbo Lord’.
Maria Whitney. First teacher
of modern languages at Smith
College and adorer of Samuel
Bowles. Dickinson wrote, ‘I
have thought of you often
since the darkness [of Bowles’s
death] - though we cannot
assist each other’s night.’
Friends and Editors
The poet’s friend Elizabeth Luna Chapin Holland and her husband, leading New York publisher Dr Josiah Holland, who thought ED’s poems too ethereal.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Boston man of letters and correspondent of the poet, lent his prestige as co-editor to the first two volumes of Dickinson’s poems.
Popular writer Helen Hunt Jackson was one of only three readers to recognise Dickinson’s genius in her lifetime.
Boston publisher Thomas Niles could not ‘consume’ the poems Dickinson sent him in 1883. He considered them ‘devoid of the true poetical qualities’.
First Generation: Battle in Court
Mabel Loomis Todd
Trusted servants to the Dickinson sisters. Maggie Maher (left) was chief witness in Vinnie’s case against her brother’s mistress. Beside Maggie is her brother-in-law Thomas Kelley, on whose shoulder the poet cried when Judge Lord fell ill.
Lavinia Dickinson in the 1880s, looking humorous and confident at the time she and Todd were preparing for the first publication of her sister’s poems.
Ned Dickinson sickened after the trial.
Second Generation: Battle of the Daughters