by Julie Dobrow
Eventually Millicent donated the great majority of these papers to Yale University. I have spent several years slowly making my way through the seven hundred-plus boxes of primary source materials that live at Yale’s Sterling Library, as well as uncovering materials that reside in libraries in Amherst, at Harvard, at Brown, and other repositories—even in the attic of an old house. Systematically reading Mabel’s and Millicent’s diaries and journals (each woman religiously kept both for many decades—Mabel for sixty-six years and Millicent for close to eighty) has given me insights into the lives, hopes and dreams of these women who so obsessively documented their lives. Sometimes I even had the great advantage of reading about the same event in each of their private writings, through each of their eyes and individual perspectives.
In their other extensive papers, I have unearthed some astonishing materials: among them, Millicent’s revealing notes from her psychiatric sessions that divulge why she felt compelled to take on her mother’s Dickinson work despite her own very considerable ambivalence, and Mabel’s lecture notes from the talks she gave on Emily Dickinson that helped craft a certain image of the poet and her work. I had the unique opportunity to read internal documents from Amherst College that shed new light on the battles over where Emily Dickinson’s papers would ultimately reside. None of these materials have ever been extensively cited in any published work. And the plethora of additional materials has yielded many other telling discoveries about these fascinating women.
These primary sources illuminate a set of captivating and intricately interconnected lives. This is ultimately a story about sorting through Mabel’s and Millicent’s papers to tell the full narrative of their lives, uncover their secrets, and see how they created mythologies and defined identities for themselves as well as for Emily Dickinson.
Mabel, who often reflected that hers was “the most positively brilliant life I know of,” came to believe that Emily Dickinson, too, lived a life with moments of dazzling vividness. It was a life she felt she understood, a torch whose shine she had seen. And yet for Mabel and for Millicent, the light of Emily’s life was still glimpsed only from a distance, shadows that emerged sporadically from her partly opened door.
INTRODUCTION
ONE FINE DAY IN MAY (1886)
Mabel Loomis Todd stared unhappily out the window, her eyes filled with tears. The beauty of the May afternoon was heart-stopping. Though the morning had been hazy, by midday the sun had broken through, brokering a quintessential New England spring day. Newly opened lilac and crabapple blossoms filled the air with their scents. “The most deliciously brilliant sunny afternoon,”1 she noted. Yet how, Mabel wondered, could such beauty exist on this day?
She dressed with care, knowing that soon she would be among the Dickinson family and other neighbors, and that she would see the woman whom she often referred to in her diaries and journals as “my dear friend, Miss Emily Dickinson.” Rather than one of the elaborate dresses on which she’d carefully hand-painted orange lilies or purple irises, on this day Mabel chose something simple. She peered at her reflection in the gilt-framed oval mirror, carefully styling her light brown hair into a series of upsweeps secured by an intricate system of combs and pins and scrutinized the small worry lines that marked her otherwise smooth porcelain skin. Five years had passed since she’d met the Dickinsons, whose wealth, many civic and artistic activities and long-standing ties to Amherst College made them one of the most influential families in town. Time had taken its toll. So much had happened, so many complications: the drama with Ned, the Dickinsons’ eldest son; the unexpected death of little Gib, youngest of the three Dickinson children. And then there was her relationship with Emily’s brother, Austin. The gathering at the Dickinsons’ was bound to be fraught with unspoken tensions.
Walking carefully down the stairs in a pair of the high-heeled shoes she insisted upon wearing each day no matter what the occasion, Mabel joined her husband, David Peck Todd. David, too, looked as if he’d aged during their time in Amherst: his blond hair was already thinning on top, though his beard and mustache were thick and bushy. The early promise of his career had yet to be realized, as both he and Mabel were all too aware.
They had arrived in the small Massachusetts college town in 1881, both in their midtwenties, filled with the dreams and determination of a young couple to succeed. They aspired to move beyond the modest circumstances in which each of them had grown up. But here they were, still renting rooms in the Lincoln family’s large, white house on Lessey Street. In many ways it hadn’t been quite the life that Mabel envisioned when she married the brilliant and dashing astronomer in 1879. She was keenly aware of the compromises.
They left the house and walked without saying a word. And yet their silence was companionable. Mabel was cognizant of her husband’s potential and his limitations; David knew all the reasons his wife was feeling so unsettled.
For Mabel the silence was also filled with bittersweet uncertainty and anticipation. They slowly made their way to the end of Lessey Street and turned left onto Main Street, which, despite being the central thoroughfare, still looked very much like a country road, narrow and unpaved. The canopies of trees planted in rows in front of the white picket fences met over the road, shielding Mabel and David from the sunshine as they walked toward the imposing mustard-colored house that was the Dickinson family home. Mabel carried with her a small bouquet of flowers—wildflowers—some of Emily Dickinson’s favorites. She had painted a panel of Indian pipe wildflowers for Emily several years before. “That without suspecting it you should send me the preferred flower of life seems almost supernatural,” Emily had written, “and the sweet glee that I felt at meeting it, I could confide to none.”2 Mabel copied the note in its entirety into her journal, noting that it “made me happier than almost any other I have ever received.”3
VIEW OF THE TWO DICKINSON HOMES ON MAIN STREET IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
As the Todds strode purposively on this short walk they had taken dozens of times, Mabel thought about other notes and gifts she’d received from Emily, their shared love of nature, and above all their love of words. She thought of the many hours that she had happily spent at The Homestead playing the piano and singing for Emily, her sister, Lavinia, and their invalid mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, before her death four years ago, in 1882. Emily always rewarded Mabel’s music with small offerings: a glass of wine on a silver salver, a flower from her conservatory, a piece of cake. And sometimes, there was a poem, “usually impromptu, evidently written on the spot.”4
Brought up to appreciate great literature, a careful and voracious reader who kept lists of all the books she’d read, Mabel knew that Emily’s poetry was unique. She was keenly aware that while Emily’s style and punctuation was nothing like that of the well-known poets of the day—Tennyson or John Greenleaf Whittier or William Ellery Channing—her verse was nevertheless strangely evocative and “full of power.”5 More than anything else, Mabel desired to make her own mark on the world as a writer. She had an inkling of Emily’s brilliance the very first time she read one of her poems in 1882. The deep affinity Mabel felt for Emily came from her respect for Emily’s gift with words, most of all.
But despite these feelings of connection and friendship over the past four years—despite the frequently exchanged notes and gifts, despite living in homes separated by less than half a mile and despite the many connections between their two families—in fact, Mabel and Emily had never actually spoken. During all of the many times that Mabel had come to The Homestead to play music, Emily had listened, hidden from view. She was always sequestered behind the partially opened door of the drawing room or beyond the door of her upstairs bedroom. Once or twice Mabel thought she had caught a fleeting glimpse of the mysterious Emily, flitting down the hall in ethereal white.
This fine day in May might have been the only time that Mabel was truly ever to see Emily. When she did see her that day, it would also be for the last time. For inside The Homest
ead, surrounded by family, Emily Dickinson lay dead in her white coffin, a little bunch of violets along with one pink cypripedium around her neck.
Emily Dickinson’s funeral was as sparse and as lovely as one of her poems. She was clothed in one of her trademark white dresses. Her sister, Lavinia, placed two heliotropes in Emily’s hand. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the noted writer, literary critic and abolitionist who traveled across the state from Cambridge to attend the funeral, read Emily Brontë’s poem on immortality, “Last Lines,” and the Dickinson family’s former pastor, Reverend Jonathan Jenkins, came almost fifty miles from Pittsfield to lead the prayer service. Higginson wrote in his diary, “The country exquisite, day perfect, & an atmosphere of its own, fine & strange about the whole house and grounds . . . E. D.’s face a wondrous restoration of youth—she is 54 . . . & looked 30, not a gray hair or wrinkle, & perfect peace on the beautiful brow.”6
Mrs. John Jameson, a neighbor of the Dickinsons’, later commented, “Nothing could have been lovelier than . . . the day of Miss Emily’s funeral—The service was suited to her—unlike any other I ever attended and very beautiful. . . . It was a never to be forgotten burial and seemed singularly fitting to the departed one.”7
After a brief service in The Homestead, the mourners walked across the fields filled with innocents and buttercups. In a letter to her mother, Mabel described the cortege, including the president of Amherst College, professors and neighbors who served as honorary pallbearers and brought Emily’s casket out the rear door of her home. Then, Mabel recorded, the “stout arms of six or eight Irish workmen, all of whom have worked about the place or been servants in the family for years, & all of whom Emily saw & talked with” carried her casket to West Cemetery, and “the friends who chose followed on irregularly through the ferny footpaths to the little cemetery.” Mabel told her parents that despite Emily’s “patrician” roots, she seemed to notice and respect the working people who surrounded her, just as she appreciated the small scenes of backyard nature so many take for granted. “The funeral—if so ghastly a name could apply to anything so poetical . . . was the most beautiful thing I ever saw,”8 Mabel wrote.
For Mabel, the beauty of the event paled in comparison to the loss she felt. She solemnly followed a small knot of the bereaved to the cemetery. Emily’s older brother, Austin, walked alone in silence, just behind the pallbearers. With his striking auburn hair and tall stature, held erect, cloaked in elegant mourning attire, Austin’s austere appearance and aloof demeanor set him apart from other funeral-goers.
When the procession reached the small Dickinson family plot where Emily would join her parents, Mabel and Austin exchanged a knowing glance, an unspoken acknowledgment of shared and private grief. But if they thought that the blaze of light in their eyes when they looked at each other went unnoticed, they were mistaken.
Mrs. Todd “was at Emily’s funeral dressed in black, looking haggard as if she had lost a dear friend,” puzzled Mrs. John Jameson. “I hear much gossip, and that many people are leaving Mrs. T ‘alone.’ It does seem a pity her fair name should be so tarnished, and such mean things said.”9
“And in the spring, also rare Emily Dickinson died & went back into a little deeper mystery than that she has always lived in. The sweet spring days have something in all their tender beauty when she was carried through the daisies and buttercups across the summer fields to be in her flowered couch,” Mabel later reflected in her journal. “It was a very great sorrow to Austin, but I have lived through greater with him, when little Gib died. He and I are so one that we comfort each other for everything, perfectly.”10
Mabel knew and felt this because she and Austin Dickinson were in love. They had admitted their feelings to each other in the fall of 1882, and with this admission, their lives changed forever. So did the lives of their respective spouses, David and Susan, along with everyone else in their families. Theirs was the dirty little secret that everyone in Amherst seemed to know. This was the subject of the gossip Mrs. Jameson had heard. This was the reason that some in Amherst would question Mabel’s friendship with Austin’s sister, Emily. This was why some would whisper about Mabel’s attendance at her funeral and the extreme grief she so publicly displayed for a woman she had never met face-to-face.
Mabel and Austin’s relationship is certainly what first brought Mabel into Emily’s house and to Emily’s door. It may also have been why initially Mabel felt a deeper connection to Emily than their actual interactions might have suggested. Mabel’s relationship with Austin was undoubtedly the lever that catapulted Mabel, and later her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, into becoming the two women who would introduce Emily Dickinson and her poetry to the world.
On May 16, the day after Emily’s death, Mabel wrote in her diary, “I went to church. It was very hard for me to get through the service. I wore all black and felt that way.”11 She told her parents, “all spirit in anything is for the time lost to me, for Emily Dickinson died . . . & everything is grey & ashen this morning.”12
Four days later, phoenixlike, the ashen haze on the morning of Emily’s funeral turned to an afternoon blaze of color that is springtime in New England. Mabel was keenly aware of the contrasts.
But what Mabel couldn’t have known on that fine day in May was that Emily Dickinson’s death would be a defining moment in her own life. Though Mabel did not realize it at the time, Emily’s death would soon yield the discovery of a treasure trove of poems no one knew existed. In odd ways, her death would ultimately mean that Mabel and Millicent would each develop a kinship with the poet through her writings that neither of them had known with her during her life. Her death began to stir simmering tensions between the Dickinson and Todd families. And it would heighten both the connections and the strains between Mabel and her daughter in ways that would irreversibly and permanently dominate their lives. Emily Dickinson’s death was just the beginning: it launched Mabel and Millicent’s efforts for the next three-quarters of a century to produce and cultivate her legacy.
CHAPTER 1
ARRIVING IN AMHERST (1856–1881)
“All my radiant wishes and beliefs”
To truly understand Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham—to understand why it was that they would each become entranced by the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson, and to understand why each would wish to take on Emily’s work as part of her own life’s mission—you have to go back. You have to know what it meant to be a woman born into the Wilder family.
The Wilder family’s matrilineal heritage could be traced straight to John and Priscilla Alden. This direct line to the Mayflower was something that all the Wilder women told their daughters they should feel proud of: it carried with it an authenticity, a connection to Puritan values and a heritage that gave them both gentility and social standing regardless of economic circumstance. Part of the narrative passed along generationally, the vaunted Alden connection provided a sense of entitlement, a surety that bloodlines meant distinction. For the Wilder women, who often seemed to marry men unable to provide a lifestyle that would match their sense of what it should be, the arts—music, painting and literature—which in the nineteenth century were thought of as acceptable ways for women to demonstrate their position in society, took on special prominence. The Wilder women aspired to excel in artistic expression, or to champion and link themselves with those who did.
THE “WILDER WOMEN,” 1884: FROM LEFT, MARY (MOLLY) ALDEN WILDER LOOMIS, MILLICENT TODD, MARY WALES FOBES WILDER (“GRANDMA WILDER”), MABEL LOOMIS TODD.
Mabel’s grandmother, Mary Wales Fobes Jones, married John Wilder II, the Trinitarian minister of Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1830s. This was when Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau were making Concord the epicenter of American transcendentalism. John and Mary were deeply connected with these artists and philosophers and valued the craft of writing; they were also active in the growing abolition movement based in Concord. John invited abolitionists to
speak from his pulpit, and Mary served as first president of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society. Of their three children only the middle daughter, Mary, known as Molly, survived to carry the Wilder line forward.
Mary Alden Wilder inherited the high moral and intellectual standards by which to judge everyone and everything else. She lauded her vaunted connection to Concord and its famous residents for her entire life. She believed, and told her daughter and granddaughter, that they came from a procession of thoughtful, intellectual, artistic and refined individuals, who were among the most important thinkers of their respective eras. Embodying this, Molly once wrote Mabel that her husband, Eben Jenks Loomis, told a visitor, “the Wilders were a race of old school scholars and gentlemen.”1 In a letter written to her granddaughter Millicent in 1897, Molly emphasized the Wilder/Concord connections and explained their significance: “The Alcotts and Hawthornes led a pathetic life quite like our own; and they loved each other in a spiritual way, very much as we do—And had to make constant sacrificing to carry out their plans . . . as we do.”2
It was into this family that connected cultural affinity and artistic excellence with social standing that Mabel was born in 1856. From the start, she was imbued with the Wilder women’s ethos. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that on a visit back to Concord, Molly and Eben put their infant daughter into the arms of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau “did not know which end was which! . . . After one agonized moment the bewildered man, with a groan of relief, relinquished me to the giver. Apparently babies bore no large part in Henry’s scheme of life.”3 It may be that Henry wanted little to do with the infant Mabel, but Mabel would continue to link her own story with his, and to connect her family to the important writers and thinkers of the transcendentalist movement. She would always seek out those whom she considered to be great artists, ally herself with them, and most of all, aspire to be remembered as a great writer, herself.