by Julie Dobrow
“Indeed, I think it will not hurt Ned . . . that he worships the very ground I walk on,” Mabel suggested in her journal. “He is only a boy—only 20—but he is the most graceful host in his own home that I have ever seen. And he is so very manly and careful of his sister, and he is simply devoted to his mother. . . . He looks so helplessly at me and said he never experienced any such feeling before that he does not know how to regard it, and he knows he is unsettled and inattentive to his studies and thinking of me every moment. . . . I could twist him around my little finger, that he would go off and kill somebody if I bade him,” she gleefully concluded.22 For Mabel, Ned’s attentions were likely an affirmation not only of her own allure and magnetism but also of her ability to attract a man who was a member of the kind of aristocratic, educated, artistic and wealthy family she most coveted.
“I have nothing but romances to write of myself,” she reflected in her journal. “As soon as I put distance between myself and one romance, another one comes to me. It’s odd, but I do like it intensely.”23
In April of 1882, as Mabel prepared to depart for two months in Washington to see Millicent and study painting, she reflected on her relationship with Ned in her journal entries, revealing the depth of Ned’s feelings for her and acknowledging that they might create problems. “What is there in me which attracts men to me, young and old? I am deeply grateful for the power, and hope I may use it for the good of those who succumb to it; but really do believe in my heart that it will be years before Ned gets entirely over it . . . I think it is well that I am soon going away. But I am really very fond of him and I shall miss him very much and he does not begin to realize how much he will miss me.”24
Once back in Washington, Mabel alternated between continuing to revel in her power over Ned and finding it troubling. She noted Ned was so smitten with her that he convinced Sue to delay the date of the gala party for his twenty-first birthday until Mabel returned to Amherst so that he could have the first dance with her. (Surprisingly, Sue appeared to find nothing amiss in this request.) Mabel commented on a letter Ned had written in which he told her that he wore in his buttonhole a pussy willow she had given him for an entire week, until the fluffy white blossoms dried and dropped off. “It would be mean and underhand to write down the tender and loving things he says to me for they are only for me, and no one else ought to hear them,” she reflected. “Of course I tell David in general about it, but my darling husband has perfect trust and confidence in me and tells me to act my own pleasure about these things.” She added, Ned “is in character a very determined and steadfast person, and I mistake him very much if his feelings will have changed at all toward me by June. . . . Well, time alone can extricate him—if he is to be extricated.”25
But Mabel clearly was coming to realize that Ned’s feelings for her were so intense that it could be inextricable—and problematic. In her journal she continued to insist that the situation had spun out of control more from Ned’s feelings than from any particular action or inaction on her part: “What can I do? He had plunged in irrevocably before I suspected it, and every time he sees me gay and brilliant in society, or sweet and tender to his mother, or tired after dancing, or kind to him, or in fact however he sees here, it adds to his love for me, and I cannot help it. . . . Of course I have told him he ought to get over it, but he cannot see that it is wrong, and I certainly shall not open the knowledge of good and evil to him.”
And Mabel also began to realize that Ned’s feelings for her could affect her relationship with Sue. She added, “His mother does not know it or of it all, of course, and she thinks it such a fine thing for her young son to have a brilliant and accomplished married lady for his friend & likes to have him pay me attention. She worships Ned, and I don’t know what she would do, if she knew just how far he appreciates having me for his friend.”26 Indeed, though she had some suspicions, Mabel had no idea of just what Sue’s wrath might mean.
During the two months in D.C. Mabel spent with Millicent in the spring of 1882, she was starting to grapple with the realization that she might need to deal with Ned Dickinson differently. But she invested much of her time in pursuit of her ongoing desire to be well-known as an artist of some kind.
In Washington her diaries record the many hours each day she spent practicing piano, the difficulty of some of the new pieces she was learning to play, and on the number of hours she spent painting. She was excited by the opportunity to study with Martin Johnson Heade. After all, Heade (though probably better known today than he was in his own era and considered by some contemporary art historians to be a preeminent member of the Hudson River School of landscape painters) had a reputation for painting extraordinary landscapes that featured the interplay between light and shadow. His paintings of tropical flowers and of hummingbirds, in particular, were quite in vogue in late nineteenth-century America. Mabel knew she had a lot to learn from him. She was thrilled when Heade told her that her painting of an iris “is the very best of everything I have done.”27 She recorded Heade’s suggestion that the small details of nature in art were the most revealing; this would also be something Mabel later realized was a key feature of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
Although David’s work with Simon Newcomb would keep him in Washington well into the summer, Mabel made plans to return to Amherst. Ned Dickinson was delighted; the time apart seemed only to increase his ardor. “My little girl, your dear little note has settled all my plans for the summer,” he wrote Mabel. “But I must confess that the dark thought had occurred to me that you would fly away with the end of the festivities to some seaside resort and bask upon the sand surrounded by the usual crowd of admirers. But it seems that I am really going to have you for the summer. Oh! What a summer it will be for me. Think of the drives we can have by sunshine and shadow and perhaps an occasional one by moonlight.” He asked Mabel to bring a riding habit with her so that he could teach her to ride—“Think of me as being the one to teach you with all new things.” He concluded, “I am so intoxicated with joy that I have written a very disconnected note . . . you see although out of sight it’s not out of mind one moment with me.”28
As wisteria and lupines bloomed at June’s start, Mabel returned to Amherst, along with Millicent and Grandma Wilder. In her diary Mabel recorded that the first thing she did after dinner on her first day back was to bring Millicent over to the Dickinsons’. Mabel was particularly keen to introduce her daughter to Gilbert Dickinson. Gib was seven years old at the time, and hardly a well-matched playmate for two-year-old Millicent. But Mabel remained determined to make a connection between the two children.
Days after her arrival in Amherst, Millicent got sick. A stomach virus combined with being in new surroundings and out of her usual routine made the toddler clingy. She would cry ceaselessly anytime Mabel attempted to leave her. Mabel recorded in her diary each day how she found this “fearfully disheartening and lonesome,” forcing her to cancel out of picnics and whist parties to which she had been invited. “I can’t so much as go down to a meal without a shriek and five minutes of hard crying,” Mabel complained. She quickly wrote to Molly and Eben, begging for help.
Grandma Wilder could not handle the situation. Neither could Mabel. Less than a week after her return, Mabel wrote in her diary: “A perfect day. But Millicent would not leave me for half a minute. I am as blue as an indigo bag. All my happiness is trembling in the balance. And there is utter silence from the home people as to whether they will come & help me.”29 Her parents and David ultimately urged Mabel to engage a nurse to help spell herself and Grandma Wilder.
And as soon as Lizzie, a young nursemaid, came aboard to help, Mabel resumed her activities. Just days after she’d written so despondently of being stuck with the crying Millicent, Mabel recorded: “This is Ned’s birthday. The party was very brilliant—I danced continually all night, I sang and played and had a glorious time. Ned looked splendidly and we were all at our best.”30 In the days that followed came the whirlwind of soc
ial activities that attended Amherst College’s commencement; Mabel was concerned that she’d twisted her ankle and wouldn’t be able to dance but “Dr. Cooper came after tea and put on a bandage so I could dance . . . I did not think of my foot at all. It was a very brilliant ball.”31 She went riding with Ned on many occasions in those weeks and reveled in reporting how everyone thought her such a natural equestrian. She seemed to put aside, for the moment, any concerns about Ned’s feelings for her, or any guilt over leaving Millicent in the care of a fifteen-year-old nursemaid and an eighty-five-year-old great-grandmother.
In Mabel’s rendering of this time a few weeks later in “Millicent’s Life” she cast it slightly differently: “I struggled along, & when she was physically well, & more happy, I went for my long deferred visit at the Dickinsons. . . . I see now that it was a mistake to bring her before Commencement, for my mind was constantly pre-occupied, & she did not fall in the new place and ways as much, or as soon as she would if I had not had other things to distract me.” These thoughts caused her to muse further: “It is a great & most stupendous question with me—this matter of children. A mother should give herself up to her children, & let nothing come between, and yet even then she cannot be with them every moment. She must sometimes be away, even if she does not go into society, nor do anything frivolous. It is a subject constantly before me, and it seems very weighty. I have not the quality of motherhood sufficiently developed.”32
Though such moments of introspection are rare among discussions of Mabel’s daily life in this time period, they give insight into her growing recognition of herself as an individual with needs, hopes and dreams that perhaps differed from those dictated by society. Such entries also tell us about Mabel’s belief that she thought of herself as an unusual woman in late nineteenth-century America, a woman who would not be content to live her life within the conventionally prescribed boundaries of mother or wife.
After the frenzied social calendar surrounding commencement had passed, Amherst settled into the somewhat slower pace of summer. Mabel’s almost daily interactions with the Dickinsons began to change. She wrote of Ned, “Of course I am a woman, and I am older than he, and I know more of life than he. I can help somewhat against himself and will try. But that is all I can do. Of course I do care for him—the wonderfully chivalrous devotion he showed me could not fail to affect me. . . . When a young man of his age comes to love any woman with the intensity with which he loves me, it cannot fail to affect his whole life.”33
At the same time, Mabel’s diaries and journals begin to record more time she spent with Austin. She noted the times when “Mr. Dickinson brought me home,” or times throughout the summer when Austin attended gatherings such as a party in nearby Shutesbury, or the times she stopped by his law office. As the summer wore on, the mentions of contact with Austin became more frequent. On September 6 she wrote: “I went to the Dickinsons in the evening and sat on the veranda alone with Mr. Dickinson senior about an hour discussing religion, thoughts and so forth. I admire him.”34
While Austin was indeed beginning to spend more time with Mabel, he was also spending more time with both Mabel and David. Throughout the summer and into the fall of 1882, there were multiple occasions on which both Mabel and David joined members of the Dickinson family for outings, dinners or other events. David, as well as Mabel, began to know and to respect Austin greatly.
Though the entries in Mabel’s journals occasionally still contained phrases such as “my darling husband” and chronicled David’s comings and goings, increasing numbers of her writings focused on Austin. In one entry in September she wrote: “Everything is so joyous and my circumstances are so pleasant. Dear Mr. Dickinson—Ned’s father—is so very fond of me. It was one of the proudest moments of my life when he told me that I had more ideas which are of consequence to him than any other person he ever met. For I most extravagantly admire him. . . . He is almost in every particular my ideal man. He is true—so true—that one look into his blue eyes when I first met him caused me to think involuntarily, ‘he could be forever trusted.’ I did not really know until lately that he is a very sensitive man, for he has a very strong, almost brusk way with his business relations. But he says he has suffered more than he can ever tell from sensitiveness.” This remarkable journal entry not only clearly shows that Mabel was falling in love with Austin, but also shows why. “All his life he has passionately loved all nature. The autumn chirp of crickets thrills him most pressibly, and the misty hills and the first red leaves. The first thing which made me sure he was a true, if silent, poet, was his saying one day up in Sunderland Park that when he died he wanted to be buried where the crickets could constantly chirp around him.” Mabel continued that day’s entry commenting, “He and I are the fastest friends. To think that out of all the splendid and noble women he has known, he should pick me out—only half his age—as the most truly congenial friend he ever had! There is no one in Amherst, or any where else, to compare with him.”35
In some ways it was surprising that Austin should have found himself on the cusp of a deep connection with Mabel Loomis Todd. William Austin Dickinson, the eldest child of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson, was twenty-seven years older than Mabel—and just one year younger than her father, Eben. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Austin maintained a robust legal practice in town and was active in Amherst’s civic affairs, serving as town moderator for fourteen years, as a founder of Wildwood Cemetery, and succeeding his father as treasurer of Amherst College in 1873. Austin was passionate about landscape design; as president of the Amherst Village Improvement Society one of his major coups was to get Frederick Law Olmsted to design a new plan for the town common. Millicent once reflected that “shrubs seemed as important as people” to Austin.36
Austin’s character was in many ways formed both because of and in opposition to his parents. By all accounts his father was an austere man not given to overt displays of love or emotion. Edward’s own father, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, had been one of the founders of Amherst College, and his personal financial overinvestment in it plummeted the family fortunes to such an extent that Edward was forced to sell the family home for a time. Determined to rebuild, Edward developed his law practice and became solvent enough to repurchase and remodel The Homestead. He was twice elected to the state legislature, and served as well in the Massachusetts Senate and Governor’s Council. As a devoted member of the Whig Party and elected to Congress, he instilled in Austin a sense of civic duty. Edward was responsible for the railway service that in 1853 would connect Amherst with other parts of the state and he served as Amherst College’s treasurer for thirty-seven years before Austin took the reins. He imparted to his son the responsibility that came with the name “Dickinson” in the town of Amherst.
When Edward died in 1874, Austin became responsible for the law practice, the finances of Amherst College, the care of his mother and two sisters, as well as his own family and the two family homes. Emily Norcross Dickinson, his mother, was a bright woman whose life was completely circumscribed by the time in which she lived. Emily spent a good part of her adult life suffering from one malady or another. The Dickinson children did not see in their mother a model for anything other than a woman who conformed to prescribed roles, though surely they knew she was capable of more. In fact, some scholars have suggested that her few surviving letters and other records show she possessed a keen intelligence, particularly in the area of sciences, though this rarely found expression in her life.37 Emily was completely subservient to Edward. She never worked outside the family home, nor did she participate in any of her husband’s civic endeavors. Indeed, she appeared to her children to be so dominated by her husband that whatever sense of purpose in life she had vanished once Edward was gone. She had a stroke that paralyzed her almost a year later, leaving daughters Emily and Lavinia largely tasked with her care until her death in 1882.
Austin’s marriage was no happier than his parents’ union had been. Fr
om a careful reading of the written record of their relationship, historian Polly Longsworth concludes that from the start, the relationship had its strains and conflicts. As an orphaned girl, the youngest of her siblings, Sue had to take much responsibility for her own education and livelihood. Longsworth suggests that Sue learned to withhold her true feelings as a defense mechanism, that this grew “out of her need to protect herself against fears of weakness.”38 Sue had a habitual distrust of people other than her own family members. Of necessity she became more independent than many women of her era tended to be, though she found in her marriage to Austin a kind of financial (if not emotional) security that eluded her up until that point. “The pattern of Sue’s behavior . . . indicates she made strenuous efforts to erase the past and its humiliations,” writes Longsworth.39 Sue clearly hoped to find a kind of stability in her life with Austin that she never experienced as a child.
Sue’s close relationship with Austin’s sister Emily, and his father’s approval of Sue as a potential match, no doubt encouraged Austin in his courtship. There are some suggestions in Austin’s letters that his earlier affections lay with one of Sue’s older sisters, Mattie, but he clearly ended up selecting the younger sister, even though Sue did not match his own emotional intensity. Austin later found out that Sue had a morbid fear of childbirth (one of her sisters died shortly after giving birth). This might have prevented her from wishing to have much of an intimate relationship with her husband, something Mabel alluded to in her journal. Austin also realized later in his marriage that Sue was socially ambitious in ways he found distasteful, shallow and vacuous. His own diaries often use phrases such as “Sue and her crowd” or “Sue and her co-spreers.” Austin increasingly found the social activities going on in his home to be objectionable disruptions to his life, referring to Sue’s parties and those of Mattie and Ned as “riots” that went on too late in the evening; he once referred to The Evergreens as “my wife’s tavern.”40