Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [258]
Millicent Todd with Mabel. At forty, she married psychologist Walter Bingham in 1920. He warned her against taking on Mamma’s feud, but it had for Millicent an ‘irresistible compulsion’.
Intelligent, dignified Millicent Todd Bingham pursued the feud into her eighties. The photo on her desk is her husband, the portrait on the wall her grandfather Eben Loomis.
Mattie Dickinson (‘Madame Bianchi’). Amherst College conferred on her an honorary degree (their first for a woman) as niece and editor of ‘that rare and original spirit, Emily Dickinson’.
Legends
A sign of the poet’s rising fame was an absurd post-centenary play, Brittle Heaven (1933). Emily supposedly vies with Amherst friend Helen Hunt for her husband, a trophy male in military uniform. Emily, covered in frills and bows, gives Lieutenant Hunt a dying duck look while Helen glares in the background.
From 1894 to 1924, as the poet’s fame grew, the Dickinson family doctored the daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson with curls, fichu and ruff in an attempt to feminise her image and hide the long funnel of the poet’s throat, through which words burst in spasms: ‘And yet—Existence—some way back / Stopped—struck my ticking—through—’.
First edition of Poems (1890) with Todd’s painting of Indian Pipes on the cover. This both asserted Todd’s claim to intimacy with the poet and promoted an acceptable image of Dickinson as a nature poet.
1
It is difficult to know what to call writers who share surnames with men known in their own right. It is therefore often convenient to use first names but all reference to them as authors will use the names on their books.
2
ED’s consistent spelling for ‘upon’.
3
Tennyson’s famous poem, ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1842), romanticised the solitary lot of a creative artist who may not - at her peril - engage in life and love. (ED read Tennyson in 1848, at the age of seventeen.)
4
Similar to the practical diversion Virginia Woolf was to find in setting type for the Hogarth Press.
5
In the network of cousinage in New England, reaching down from the colonial period, the Montagues were linked with the leading families, including the Norton and Quincy families; Abigail Adams, wife of the second president; and Abigail Adams Cranch, grandmother of T. S. Eliot.
6
A plan of the new settlement in 1663 shows Richard Montague’s eight-acre plot on the North Highway to the Woods and Nathaniel Dickinson’s eight-acre plot on the Middle Highway to the Woods (The Genealogy of the Montague Family).
7
If Hale replied, his letter would have been destroyed after ED’s death, along with all other letters to her.
8
The comical vehemence of Mrs Micawber, loyal to her endearingly helpless husband in David Copperfield (1848).
9
Mr Eliot’s brother was William Greenleaf Eliot, who had left their native Boston in order to found the Unitarian Church in St Louis. His grandson was to be the poet T. S. Eliot. The link of the two poets may seem tenuous, but both were part of the network of New England families rooted in the Puritan period and imbued with its high-minded habits of spiritual search.
10
Another secret queen of the 1850s, Lucy Snow in Villette, sits on her throne in an attic, declaiming to the garret vermin.
11
This image comes from Hans Christian Andersen’s story, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’.
12
He alludes to Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers.
13
A leading London authority, Edward Sieveking, stated the reasons in On Epilepsy (1858): the excitement of the ‘marital act’ might cause fits in those susceptible. Marriage was discouraged also for the sake of the partner and potential offspring.
14
This sinister diagnosis permitted the incarceration of epileptics in asylums. Women were more susceptible than men, in the view of the French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Esquirol in 1838, and women were more numerous in his National Asylum at Charenton. Of 385 epileptic female patients placed in this asylum, forty-six were diagnosed as ‘furious’ and thirty-four as ‘hysterical’. Anger and hysteria would have appeared contrary to the