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15

Dickinson’s words correlate with Dostoyevsky’s extraordinary record of epilepsy in The Idiot (1868), part two, chapter 5 (Penguin Classics, 263-4). Both stress a breakthrough into what Dickinson called ‘Existence’ and what Dostoyevsky called ‘a higher existence’: at once, a supreme rationality and vision. Dostoyevsky reports a stage immediately before the seizure when the brain ‘seemed to burst into flame’ and with a jolt all vital forces tensed together. The sensation of life and of self-awareness increased almost tenfold. But these moments ‘were merely the presentiment of that final second (never more than a second), with which the fit itself began’. Afterwards, Prince Myshkin would ask himself if he had experienced a violation of the normal condition. ‘What does it matter if it’s an illness then,’ he decides, if the result yields an unheard-of completeness, proportion, reconciliation and ecstasy? In the very last conscious moment he could to say to himself: ‘Yes, for this moment one could give up one’s whole life!’ Myshkin does not insist on this conclusion because of the aftermath when the fit subsides into ‘stupefaction’ (what Dickinson calls languor). He’s left with the question of what to do with this ‘reality’. In both writers, the ‘moment’ opens up a sense of the timeless. Myshkin quotes from Revelation, x: 1-7 - ‘there shall be time no longer’ - and conjectures a similar revelation for ‘the epileptic Mahomet’: ‘in that very second he was able to survey all the habitations of Allah’.

16

Since reading can lead to changes in the brain, there was a belief that reading excited the brain in a way that prompted attacks in those who were susceptible. (Scott, The History of Epileptic Therapy, 134).

17

A supposed disease, ‘hystero-epilepsy’ was part of the proliferation of hysteria as a diagnosis reserved for women in the nineteenth century. Charcot, in Paris, emphasised the passions - wrath, fright, lust, disgust - as a cause of epilepsy. He implied that epilepsy was psychological, self-induced and, as such, controllable. This message was coercive: a woman should exercise decent control. (In a letter to her friend Abiah Root, Emily Dickinson mentions feeling unwell from time to time, her understanding that she should control the ‘feelings’ and then, ruefully, confesses her inability to do so when the ‘feelings’ come upon her.) If she was enduring a physically uncontrollable sickness such as epilepsy, she was fortunate not to have been exposed to a reproving diagnosis. The price of protection, to take cover at home, would have been the natural choice.

18

In the prostitute setting of ‘Sweeny Erect’ (1919), Eliot’s poem revives the link between female sexuality and an epileptic attack.

19

Together with Benjamin Pierce of Harvard. Their work began in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

20

A table showing the places of a heavenly body for every day of a given period.

21

Moghul or Mogul is derived from the Mongol empire in India, and ‘Great Mogul’ was a sixteenth-century phrase used by Europeans for the emperor of Delhi who ruled over most of Hindustan. In the seventeenth century the phrase came to mean an autocratic ruler. Dickens used the word in this pejorative sense: ‘your sister comes the Mogul over us’. A picture of the Great Mogul was on the wrapping of the best playing cards, and since Susan gave card parties Mabel could have seen the image there.

22

Not all the code signs can be interpreted.

23

Dickinson prescriptions (amongst others from the period 1882-5) are pasted into a record book belonging to the Adams drugstore in Amherst. This was not the only drugstore in town but it served the Dickinson family, and it’s possible to list, with dates, certain drugs prescribed for Emily Dickinson. These tally with contemporary treatments for epilepsy. The drugstore records during the last years of her life show that Amherst’s Dr Bigelow, who often treated the Dickinsons, prescribed glycerine (the same medicine Dr Jackson had given her in 1851) on 28 June 1884 - that