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You may cancel at any time with no questions asked. You are a subscriber but you have not yet set up your account for premium online access. Soon, a wide readership formed and her posthumous fame grew, nourished by the stories people passed around. Some thought she was a mystic. Later readers assumed that she was in love with Susan. Lyndall Gordon, a recent biographer, argued that Dickinson was epileptic and feared suffering one of her seizures in public.
You can find support for any of these theories, and many others, in the poems; their quirks, though evened out by her early editors, nevertheless lend credence to the idea that she was a familiar New England stereotype, the flighty, eccentric, proto-spinster daughter. These volumes complement an astounding new digital resource. Harvard, which hoards its Dickinson materials in Houghton Library, reportedly wanted users to buy subscriptions. It is a pleasant fancy to imagine that Dickinson, ever the tortoise in relation to rushing time, knew that, in the end, we would catch up to her.
There are countless expressive features of a Dickinson manuscript, all but a few of them effaced when her poems enter a standard print edition. There are watermarks and embossments around which Dickinson steers her words. The paper is ruled, except when it is not. It has been argued that Dickinson refused publication exactly because it was synonymous with print, whose standardizing tendencies she knew would miscarry her precision effects. Susan Dickinson's letters D, F, L.
The letter H is probably also hers. The meaning of these letters is not clear, although they perhaps indicate certain themes: N for a poem about nature, D for death, L for love or life, for example, possibly suggesting a way of organizing the poems into topic clusters for publication.
At times, Dickinson seems to be fitting variants into the available blank space on the fascicle sheet, without regard for uniform placement. Whole poems may be variants of each other. Thomas H. Johnson and R. Franklin do not always agree on how to interpret the manuscript page. It was Emily herself who helped to devise the blueprint for her legend, starting at the age of 23 when she declined an invitation from a friend: "I'm so old-fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.
Born in into the leading family of Amherst, a college town in Massachusetts, she never left what she always called "my father's house". Townsfolk spoke of her as "the Myth". On the face of it, the life of this New England poet seems uneventful and largely invisible, but there's a forceful, even overwhelming character belied by her still surface.
She called it a "still — Volcano — Life", and that volcano rumbles beneath the domestic surface of her poetry and a thousand letters. Stillness was not a retreat from life as legend would have it but her form of control. Far from the helplessness she played up at times, she was uncompromising; until the explosion in her family, she lived on her own terms. Her widely spaced eyes were too keen for the passivity admired in women of her time. It's the sensitive face of a person who as her brother put it "saw things directly and just as they were".
At 17, as a student at Mount Holyoke in the same year that the women's movement took a stand at Seneca Falls , she refused to bend to the founder of her college, the formidable Mary Lyon. At this time Massachusetts was the scene of a religious revival opposed to the inroads of science.
When Miss Lyon pressed her students to be "saved", nearly all succumbed. Emily did not. On 16 May, she owned, "I have neglected the one thing needful when all were obtaining it. During a creative burst in the early s, she invited a Boston man of letters to be her mentor, but could not take his advice to regularise her verse.
Helpful Mr Higginson, a supporter of women, who thought he was corresponding with an apologetic, self-effacing spinster, was puzzled to find himself "drained" of "nerve-power" after his first visit to her in She had said a lot of strange things, from which Higginson deduced an "abnormal" life. There was an increasing divide between people she wished to know and those she didn't. Her clarity could not endure social talk instead of truth; piety instead of "The Soul's Superior instants".
Her directness would have been disconcerting if she did not "simulate" conventionality, and this was "stinging work". But a more threatening challenge, deeper below the surface, fired the volcanoes and earthquakes in her poems — an event, as she put it, that "Struck — my ticking — through —".
Something in her life has so far remained sealed. The poems tease the reader about "it" and her almost overwhelming temptation to "tell". I want to open up the possibility of an unsentimental answer.
If true, it would explain the conditions of her life: her seclusion and refusal to marry. Once we know what "it" is, it will be obvious why "it" was buried and why its lava jolts out from time to time through the crater of her "buckled lips".
During the poetic spurt of her early 30s, Dickinson transforms sickness into a story of promise:. Sickness is always there, shielded by cover stories: in youth, a cough is mentioned; in her mids, trouble with her eyes. Neither came to much. In her poems, sickness can be violent: she speaks of "Convulsion" or "Throe". There's a mechanism breaking down, a body dropping. It "will not stir for Doctors". Allowing for the poet's resolve to tell it "slant", through metaphor, are we not looking at epilepsy?
In its full-blown form, known as grand mal, a slight swerve in a pathway of the brain prompts a seizure. Since the falling sickness, as epilepsy used to be known, had shaming associations with "hysteria", masturbation, syphilis and impairment of the intellect leading to "epileptic insanity", it was unnameable, particularly when it struck a woman. In the case of men secrecy was less strict, and fame in a few — Caesar, Muhammad, Dostoevsky — overrode the stigma, but a woman had to bury herself in a lifelong silence.
If this guess is right, it's remarkable that Dickinson developed a voice from within that silence, one with a volcanic power to bide its time. Prescriptions one from an eminent physician, others in the records of an Amherst drugstore show that Dickinson's medications tally with contemporary treatments for epilepsy.
The condition, which has a genetic component, appeared in two other members of the Dickinson family. One was Cousin Zebina, a lifelong invalid, immured at home across the road, whose bitten tongue in the course of a "fit" is noted by Emily in her first surviving letter at the age of Then her nephew, Ned Dickinson, turned out to be afflicted.
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