by Julie Dobrow
I have to put Mimi Dakin of Amherst College’s Archives and Special Collections in a paragraph all her own. Mimi, who always apologizes for couching her observations in the phrase “I sense,” in fact has more sense and better historical instincts than almost anyone I know. Her knowledge of nineteenth-century Amherst is astounding; her understanding of the Dickinson/Todd relations, profound. Time and again she has gone above and beyond what anyone could possibly expect or even hope for, tracking down sources, procuring permissions, reading drafts of chapters. I am “grateful beyond words,” as Mabel would have said, for Mimi’s thoughtful perusal of every page of this book.
Other colleagues in the world of Mabel and Millicent have lent both assistance and insight: Marianne Curling of the Amherst Historical Society and Museum, who gave me free rein to roam the museum and find Mabel’s artifacts in storage, invited me to speak in Amherst multiple times, to lead “MLT tours of Amherst” and to co-curate an exhibit on “Mabel Loomis Todd in the World”; Dick Aronson of Amherst College, who’s been a cheerful cheerleader along the way; Martha Umphrey of Amherst College’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry, who invited me to speak there; Sharon Nancy White, who corresponded with me about her pioneering doctoral dissertation on Mabel; Elizabeth Horan of Arizona State University, who is always up for a talk about Mabel and Millicent even though her own work has migrated to other fascinating women; Candace Riddington, whose novel Rubicon helped me envision Mabel in new ways; Susan Snively, whose novel The Heart Has Many Doors opened up images of Emily Dickinson; and William Luce, whose classic play The Belle of Amherst was so inspirational, as was our lengthy conversation.
I spent a wonderful day with Steve Kress, Juanita Roushdy, Sue Schubel and Eric Snyder on Hog Island at the Audubon Camp in 2013. Their interest in and support of my project continued well past that lovely summer afternoon. Steve and Juanita invited me to come back and give the keynote address at the eightieth anniversary of the Hog Island camp in 2016. Staying on the island, tasting the salt on my skin, seeing the towering pine trees and hearing the early morning avian cacophony made me understand viscerally why Mabel and Millicent felt this was one of the most special spots on earth.
Friends and mentors from my days in the Valley remind me of another very special spot for the Todds, for the Dickinsons and for me. Many years ago they encouraged me to look beyond the twentieth-century Pioneer Valley and delve into its past. I especially thank Neal Salisbury, who started me on the historical journey I’ve continued.
Rick Sewall and Emily McDermott generously allowed me access to their attic and to the wonderful letters, files and unpublished papers of Richard Sewall. It was a biographer’s dream come true to sit on the floor, sift through boxes and uncover treasures! Lincoln Brower, Doug Morse, Jean McClure Mudge and the late Hugh Hawkins, each of whom had met Millicent, kindly shared their recollections and offered insights that could only come from those who had looked into her deep and fathomless eyes.
Colleagues at Tufts University encouraged and reinforced me in numerous ways. I’m thankful for former vice-provost Mary Lee’s belief in me and in this project and her financial support of it; Beth Knauss in her office made all the logistics work. The old “CMS team”—John Ciampa and Leslie Goldberg—were incredibly helpful in ways that kept my “day job” running smoothly. My former student, Menglan Chen, assisted with research at Harvard. David Brittan, past editor of Tufts Magazine, gave me the first opportunity to publish material on Mabel and Millicent. His sage advice and expert editorial instincts guided me well past that initial article.
Ralph Aarons, David Henry Feldman, Jonathan Garlick, Chip Gidney, Sonia Hofkosh, Paul Joseph, Peter Levine, Susan Napier, Diane O’Donoghue, Fernando Ona, Colin Orians, Martha Pott, Donna Qualters, George Scarlett, Annie Soisson and Alan Solomont have all been good friends and good colleagues, each in his or her own way helping me to believe in the importance of doing interdisciplinary work that gets us out of our academic silos. Tony Rudel, friend and colleague, has been quick to read a section of text, offer a contact or share experiences. Nina Gerassi-Navarro and Barbara Grossman have been especially inspirational and influential, as sister twenty-first-century biographers writing about the lives of nineteenth-century women. And very special thanks to Jennifer Burton, amazing colleague and dear friend, who also asked me to dress up and take on the role of Mabel in her film Half the History. My understanding of my subject took on new dimensions as I began to experience what it must have been like to wear long skirts and corsets in the summer’s heat!
Mark Kramer, my most important writing teacher, offered good advice, good cheer and exceptional conversation over Chinese food in little hole-in-the-wall eateries. I’m also grateful to Gregory Maguire for tea at his kitchen table one day; he urged me not to be beholden to chronology and told me that I was ready to start writing this book.
Through a circuitous path, the extraordinary Gabrielle Burton helped me find the right agent. I’m sad that she didn’t get to see this book but will forever be thankful she knew it would be published. My agent, Wendy Strothman, and her colleague Lauren MacLeod, have been founts of wisdom throughout this process. Wendy knew from the start how best to position this story and her impeccable instincts have been spot-on ever since. Anne Hulecki gave me valuable legal advice. John Netzer, general manager of the Concord Bookshop, helped me select W. W. Norton from the group of publishers who were interested in this project; his sterling knowledge of the world of books demonstrated anew why independent bookstores are so important.
My editor, Jill Bialosky, consistently helped steer this book’s direction. Her deep interest in Emily Dickinson and her understanding of poetry’s cultural roles undoubtedly helped to shape the narrative in significant ways. Drew Weitman cheerfully, competently and quickly assisted me with queries of all kinds and I am grateful for her organization, resourcefulness and responsiveness. The wonderful team at Norton designed, copyedited, checked and referenced this book from start to finish: thank you to Lauren Abbate, Michael Fodera, Jesse Fox, Nina Hnatov, Francine Kass, Sam Mitchell, Susan Sanfrey, Peter Tasca, Michelle Waters and Nancy Wolff. Janet Byrne helped to mold early chapters, and Gail Bambrick aided with intelligent and compassionate editing of later ones.
Other friends and family have been squarely there for me throughout the past several years of this project. Gretchen Dobson, Sandy Schultz Hessler, Elizabeth Henderson Norton, Deborah Robin and Roberta Oster Sachs have been stalwart friends who might not live close by anymore but who are forever close to me in different ways.
I almost don’t have words to thank my brothers, Joe and Marty. Joe has been my web guru and marketer extraordinaire; our shared love of history, spending time in archives and the joy of discovering nineteenth-century sources reached new heights during this time in which each of us has been working on a book. Marty, my brother with the heart of a poet, and Missy-Marie Montgomery, my sister-in-law who actually is one, both understood the various layers of this project from its inception to its conclusion and consistently buoyed me with their interest and love.
From the time I was very young, my parents, Vicki and Alan Dobrow, nurtured my love of writing, of history and of books. To this day they delight in telling the story of how, as a newly mobile toddler, I would crawl over to bookshelves, pull myself upright and yank books off the shelf. I know I did this because they showed me from my earliest days that books open up worlds.
My love of books no doubt also came from my grandmother, Minna Levy Dobrow. Well into the final decade of her life, she and I enjoyed many talks about what we were reading and why it was important. I am indebted to her and to my parents for this legacy, as well as the many others they’ve given me.
And I’m deeply grateful to those with whom I live: my children Mira, Aaron, Jeremy and Jonathan, and my son-in-law Nick Allen, who have endured endless stories of Mabel and Millicent, asked good questions and sustained me with their interest, their teasing and their love. I also thank Nick for his work on this
book’s frontispiece and Aaron for additional website work. My husband, Larry Vale, read drafts promptly and offered expert editorial suggestions on everything from phrasing to sequencing. He went over and above what any editor would do to look up nineteenth-century word usages, explanations of astronomical phenomena and arcane bits of family history for some of the people who populate this book. He fortified and encouraged me in this endeavor more times and in more ways than I could recount, and for this, and for so much more, has my most profound gratitude and love.
Lincoln, Massachusetts, 2018
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
Archives
ACA: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
BPL: Boston Public Library
DPTP: David Peck Todd Papers (MS 496B), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library
HLHU: Dickinson Family Papers (MS Am 1118.95), Houghton Library, Harvard University
Jones: Emily Dickinson Collection, Jones Library Special Collections, Amherst
MDB: Martha Dickinson Bianchi Papers (MS 2010.046), Brown University Library Special Collections, John Hay Library
MLTP: Mabel Loomis Todd Papers (MS 496C). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library
MTBP: Millicent Todd Bingham Papers (MS 496D), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library
NYPL: Montague-Collier family papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library
TBPC: Todd-Bingham Picture Collection (MS 496E), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library
Note: Wherever possible, the series, box and folder number are listed (for example, II, 11–22). Sometimes a range of folders is noted where appropriate (II, 11–22–25). Sometimes a page number is noted after the folder number, if appropriate (II, 11–22, 11). In the MLT collection, diaries and journals are on microfilm and the reel number is cited. Yale, Amherst, Harvard and Brown use different numbering systems for their boxes/folders; these are reflected in the notes. Dates are provided when they existed on the original source; if no date appeared, it is marked as such (n.d.). Some sources had only partial date information available, which is reflected in the notes. Nineteenth-and twentieth-century-style dating of sources are also reflected in the notes.
People
DPT: David Peck Todd
ED: Emily Dickinson
EJL: Eben Jenks Loomis
MAWL: Mary Alden Wilder Loomis
MLT: Mabel Loomis Todd
MT, MTB: Millicent Todd Bingham
WAD: William Austin Dickinson
Books
Ancestors’ Brocades: Millicent Todd Bingham, Ancestors’ Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945).
Austin and Mabel: Polly Longsworth, Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).
Editing: Ralph W. Franklin, The Editing of Emily Dickinson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967).
Home: Millicent Todd Bingham, Emily Dickinson’s Home (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955).
Letters: Mabel Loomis Todd, ed., Letters of Emily Dickinson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1931).
Life: Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
Loaded Guns: Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns (New York: Viking, 2010).
Revelation: Millicent Todd Bingham, Emily Dickinson: A Revelation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954).
PREFACE
1.Emily Dickinson, “In Vain,” in Poems by Emily Dickinson, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890), 57. [Note: This is a later verse in the poem now known by its first line, “I cannot live with You” (poem 640 in the Thomas Johnson edition).]
2.Life, 19, 26.
3.Ibid., 66.
4.See, for example, Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); Martha Nell Smith, Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).
INTRODUCTION: ONE FINE DAY IN MAY
1.MLT, “Diary,” 19 May 1896, MLTP, III, 41, reel 3.
2.ED to MLT, “Journal,” 6 October 1882, MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
3.MLT, “Journal,” 6 October 1882, MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
4.MLT, “Notes on Emily,” 1889, MLTP, VII, 103–266.
5.MLT, “Diary,” 2 August 1882, MLTP, III, 41, reel 3.
6.Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 475. Note: Actually, Higginson’s math was incorrect. Emily Dickinson was fifty-five at the time of her death, not fifty-four.
7.Mrs. John Jameson to Frank Jameson, 23 May 1886, in Leyda, Years and Hours, 475–76.
8.MLT to MAWL, 23 May 1886, MLTP, II, 34.
9.Mrs. John Jameson, May 1886, in Austin and Mabel, 121.
10.MLT, “Journal,” 1 September 1886, MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
11.MLT, “Diary,” 17–18 May 1886, MLTP, III, 41, reel 3.
12.MLT to MAWL and EJL, 16 May 1886, MLTP, II, 30–916.
CHAPTER 1: ARRIVING IN AMHERST
1.MAWL to MLT, 1 September 1884.
2.MAWL to MTB, 18 May 1897, MTBP, I, 17–256.
3.MLT, “The Thoreau Family: Two Generations Ago,” 1930s, MLTP, V, 76–298.
4.MLT, “Early Memories,” n.d., MLTP, VII, 116–452, 2.
5.Ibid., 5.
6.See, for example, Wendy Gamber, The Boardinghouse in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
7.Austin and Mabel, 15.
8.MTB, “Reminiscences,” 1933, MTBP, II, 46–8, 7.
9.Sharon Nancy White, “Mabel Loomis Todd: Gender, Power and Language in Victorian America” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1982).
10.MLT, “Journal,” 1 May 1897, MLTP, III, 45, reel 7.
11.MLT, “Early Memories,” n.d., MLTP, VII, 116–452, 11–12.
12.MLT to MAWL and EJL, 10 February 1875, MLTP, II, 30–916.
13.MLT to DPT, 1 August 1878, DPTP, I, 12–393.
14.Austin and Mabel, 23.
15.MLT, “Journal,” 1879, MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
16.Ibid., 23 March 1873, MLTP, III, 45, reel 7.
17.Ibid., 17 January 1878.
18.MLT to MAWL and EJL, n.d., MLTP, II, 30–916.
19.MLT, “Journal,” 15 December 1876, MLTP, III, 45, reel 7.
20.Ibid., 30 November 1877.
21.Ibid., 21 July 1878; DPT to MLT, 9 October 1878; MLT, “Journal,” 3 August 1879, MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
22.MLT, “Journal,” 5 March 1879, MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
23.Stephanie Coontz, Marriage: A History (New York: Penguin, 2005).
24.MLT, “Diaries,” 25 January 1879, III, 39, reel 1.
25.MLT, “Journal,” 5 August 1879, MLTP, III, 45, reel 7.
26.DPT to MLT, 14 April 1927, MLTP, II, 37.
27.MLT, “Millicent’s Life,” n.d., MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
28.Ibid.
29.MLT, “Journal,” 5 August 1879, MLTP, III, 45, reel 7.
30.DPT to MLT, 31 August 1879, MLTP, II, 1043.
31.DPT, in White, “Mabel Loomis Todd,” 106.
32.MLT, “Journal,” September 1879, MLTP, III, 45, reel 7.
33.Ibid., 28 September 1879.
34.Ibid., 15 May 1879.
35.MLT, “Millicent’s Life,” n.d., MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
36.Ibid., “Millicent’s Life,” n.d., Part II, 2.
37.MLT, “Diary,” February 27, 1880, MLTP, III, 40, reel 2.
38.MLT, “Millicent’s Life,” n.d., MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
39.Ibid.
40.MLT, “Journal,” 3 March 1881, MLTP, III, 45, reel 7.
41.MLT, “Millicent’s Life,” n.d., MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
42.MLT, “Journal,” 31 December 1880, MLTP, III, 45, reel 7.
43.MLT, “Mil
licent’s Life,” n.d., MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
44.MLT, “Journal,” 12 September 1881, MLTP, III, 46, reel 8.
45.Ibid., 9 July 1881.
46.Ibid., 26 October 1881.
47.MLT, “Diary,” 29 September 1881, MLTP, III, 39, reel 1.
48.MLT to MAWL, 2 October 1881; 4 October 1881, MLTP, II, 34.
49.MLT to MAWL, October, 1881.
CHAPTER 2: MEETING AND COURTING THE DICKINSONS
1.MLT, “Diary,” 3 October 1881; 12 October 1881; 25 October 1881, MLTP, III, 39, reel 1.
2.See, for example, Vivian Pollak, Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Smith, Rowing in Eden; Loaded Guns.
3.See, for example, “Susan and Emily Dickinson,” The Dickinson Electronic Archives Project, http://archive.emilydickinson.org/susanemilylivesinletters.html; Jean McClure Mudge, “Emily Dickinson and ‘Sister Sue,’” Prairie Schooner 52, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 90–108.
4.Polly Longsworth, “The ‘Latitude of Home’: Life in the Homestead and the Evergreens,” in The Dickinsons of Amherst, ed. Christopher Benfey et al. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 37.
5.“Obituary of Susan Gilbert Dickinson,” Springfield Republican, May 13, 1913.
6.MLT, “Journal,” 26 October 1881, MLTP, III, 45, reel 7; MLT, “Scurillous but True,” MLTP, VII, 116–456.
7.MLT to MAWL, 2 October 1881; 4 October 1881, MLTP, II, 34.
8.MLT, “Journal,” December 1881; 1 January 1882, MLTP, III, 45, reel 7.
9.Ibid., 20 January 1882.
10.Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 71–108.
11.White, “Mabel Loomis Todd,” 150–62. Note: White and Longsworth interpret Mabel’s symbols differently.