Elaine Showalter, that doyenne of gynocriticism, famously declared: “To compare any other American poet to Emily Dickinson is to understate her exceptional originality and uniqueness.” Original and unique her poetry may well have been, but she could also be insufferable and suffocating to be around, particularly in her early relationship with her future sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. Lyndall Gordon, in the first biography of Dickinson to be published since 1974, conveys this beautifully. We are given not just Emily the scribbling eccentric, after whose death would be found 1,789 poems, only around half a dozen of which were published during her lifetime, but a great deal more than The Belle of Amherst, a town which “held out against the metropolitan tolerance of Boston”.
The reader is treated to Dickinson as a poet in the context of her most important environment, because Gordon has chosen to focus on the familial relationships, and feuds, hence the overly long title of this book. Gordon begins with a list of family members which, along with the section and chapter headings, serves to frame this work in a manner that causes premature and rather unnecessary information overload.
We are first introduced to Dickinson’s father, of whom we get the gist when, asked by a photographer to smile for the camera, he keeps his head held as if in an invisible brace, eyes unflinching, and replies, through set jaw, “I yam smiling.” This portrait of her father sets the scene for how the Dickinson children were brought up by parents who were determined, at all costs, to keep up appearances, despite Mrs Dickinson’s “tendency to tears”. Her mother seems to have suffered from post-natal depression. After giving birth, and close to emotional breaking point, she was given not the most thoughtful present by her husband: The Mother at Home: Principles of Maternal Duty.
Dickinson, despite her parents’ emotional paralysis, and doubtless compensating for that, channelled her own emotions into intense friendships, writing poetry and reading books, favourites of which were the Brontes: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights et al. Wild emotions, in these books, are given what must have seemed to her attractive expression; something with which she could identify.
Susan Gilbert, with whom she would enjoy the longest friendship, was said to have a talent for mathematics and had been encouraged by a Yale graduate to apply there. But it would have been for any young woman, and doubly so for Susan, who was an orphan. She was an even more voracious reader than Emily, eventually amassing more than 3,000 volumes.
Coming to know each other at their most impressionable ages, they formed a strong bond. Yet it was a bond, before Susan married Austin, that never seemed to satisfy Dickinson in its intensity, whereas the same could not be said for Susan, who left Amherst for a while, her friendship with Dickinson cooling somewhat, until she returned as Austin’s wife.
Naturally, some may say, this intense bond between Dickinson and Susan, together with their letters, has given rise to the suggestion they were lesbians. Gordon seems intent on refuting this, rationalising the close relationships women had at this time, as well as the subconscious danger of marriage leading to childbirth and childbirth leading to possible death. All this ticks along, with Austin and Susan moving into a newly built house next door, until the arrival of Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of a young astronomy lecturer and the woman who would become Austin’s long-term mistress. Their affair was known about not just by both spouses, but also by Dickinson, in whose house the affair was largely conducted, and her younger sister Lavinia.
Having Austin was not enough for Mabel, a young woman who, like the older Susan, had unrequited ambitions. She also wanted Emily the poet, in whose work she recognised an extraordinary talent, and yet who, bizarrely, she would never meet. But after Dickinson’s death it was Mabel who arranged for the publication of her first collection of poetry and who is, largely, responsible for her posthumous celebrity, all the more potent because it remained unrealised while Dickinson was still alive, calling to mind a quote of hers that celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.
As if the years of her own unrealised ambition came to taunt her in the image of her husband’s mistress, Susan rose up and delivered her own distinct image of Dickinson against the younger mistress of her husband, thus giving birth to two camps: the sister Susan camp and the mistress Mabel camp. This rivalry proceeded well into the 20th century, with Susan’s daughter Martha and Mabel’s daughter Millicent both putting out their own Dickinson related works and feuding over the sale of her papers, making for many headlines along the way.
Lyndall Gordon’s work is to be highly recommended and will, I’m sure, become a standard text not just in Dickinson studies, but in women’s history, because this is not just about Emily Dickinson, or her work, but about a series of brilliant women: Emily, Susan, and Mabel. Dickinson, to a large extent, felt she had to keep secret her own outlet – poetry – to contain the person she was; Susan as a potential maths whizz had the talent but not, realistically, the opportunity; and Mabel who, it would seem, despite having an eye for Emily’s talent, resorted to manipulation and fighting the wife of her lover. A page-turning series of events it may be, but a sorry tale for all that, not least because of the legacy it left to their feuding daughters.
