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By Root 642 0

with a capital N; the tease speaking in riddles to those who would know her; the flirt who exults in the role of a ‘Wife—without the Sign!’; and above all, the not-so-veiled boasts of volcanic power controlled by poetic form. Yet for all the poems’ confessional aplomb, a secret slips into silence even as the poet points to it in one of her most telling poems. ‘I tie my Hat’ is about an explosive Existence coexisting with the speaker’s visible life as a nineteenth-century woman. Modest domesticity is her cover for the soul’s immensity, breaking through her clockwork routines:

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—

Life’s little duties do—precisely—

As the very least

Were infinite—to me—

I put new Blossoms in the Glass—

And throw the Old—away—

I push a petal from my Gown

That anchored there—I weigh

The time ’twill be till six o’clock—

So much I have to do—

And yet—Existence—some way back—

Stopped—struck—my ticking—through—. . .

A double life is not surprising: it’s almost inevitable with intelligent women of Dickinson’s homebound generation. She was drawn to Jane Eyre, and Maggie Tulliver, George Eliot’s provincial girl whose ‘eyes were full of unsatisfied intelligence and unsatisfied, beseeching affection’. All these aspiring nineteenth-century women struggle for self-control and contrive to do their duty. What’s stranger in Dickinson’s character are the silences surrounding almost every word in the climactic couplet about the nameless thing that ‘struck’ a tick-tock life.

Unanswered questions resonate in the wake of lives, and no one more elusive than Emily Dickinson. To approach a biographical absence, the first responsible step was to map her social landscape. This enterprise was initiated in Emily Dickinson’s Home (1955) by Millicent Todd Bingham, and carried forward by her executor, Richard B. Sewall, who filled in a detailed background in his two-volume Life of Emily Dickinson (1974), where the poet is not born until the second volume. Then Alfred Habegger reconfigured the factual portrait with enormous detective flair in 2001. To track down verifiable facts has been an impressive achievement of the last half-century.

A complementary venture lies ahead: to risk ‘the Abyss’, the biographic sources of a creativity we can never fully explain. In that sense, the poet is right to warn us off, yet the enigma she presents beckons: its teasing insistence suggests something to be solved. Early biographers got lost in the byways of fancy but there are two securer openings to the larger truth of her buried life: one will explore what the poet confides in letters and poems about her ‘sickness’, how it strikes her and the strange lift it offers her work. A linked approach will be through archival records of a different sort of disruption: a family feud in which she was interfused.

This material has been tapped by one interest or another, but this is the first attempt to tell the whole story. The actors happen to have been incessant recorders in letters, diaries, journals, unfinished autobiographies, reminiscences, interviews and taped memoirs. The abundance of archival record makes it possible to know the actors close up, to see the scenes they played and hear them speak. Exchanges may be set out in dialogue, as in drama or fiction, but all words, scenes and claims of participants in the feud are documented in source notes.

Though the feud began with adultery, Emily Dickinson became its focus after her death, each side battling for her unpublished papers. The issue was not so much money as the right to own the poet - the right to say who she was. Each side claimed to know, and fought to promote its legend. These legends still guard the entrance to the Abyss, for the feud persists even now. It started with a newcomer to Amherst who was drawn to the Dickinson family, and even more to its invisible poet.

In the late summer of 1881 Mabel Loomis Todd, aged twenty-four, arrived from Washington. It had been a two-week journey, by boat from Baltimore and across the Long Island Sound; then by train to Hartford, Connecticut;