Nobody's Secret
Page 17
She wrote, “A friend I love so dearly came and asked me to ride in the woods, the sweet-still woods . . . I told him I could not go . . .”
Then she wrote, “I went cheerfully round my work, humming a little air till mother had gone to sleep, then cried with all my might.”
Emily’s schoolfriends could not keep up with the fierce intelligence she expressed in her letters to them. As she entered her twenties, her social circle shrank to the family and very close family friends. However, she expanded her correspondence to include some of the great thinkers of the time.
By the time Emily was thirty, she had become a recluse, rarely leaving her home, and she wore only white cotton housedresses. Because they rarely saw her, the townspeople began to refer to her as “Myth” or the “Woman in White.”
A few of her poems were published in local newspapers without her permission. Emily was furious that her punctuation and spelling had been “corrected” and refused to consider publishing again, although she shared many of her poems with family and friends. Yet no one in her limited circle suspected how much she was writing.
After Emily’s death, Vinnie was shocked to find more than 1,800 poems among Emily’s things. Always her sister’s champion, she arranged for them to be published. Emily would have been dismayed to see that the editors once again altered her punctuation, titled her poems, and even changed words to improve the rhymes. But she might have smiled to see that the cover was illustrated with Indian pipes, her favorite flower.
Despite the editors’ meddling, the poems were a critical and commercial success, establishing Emily as a major poet. It was not until 1955 that her original poems, exactly as she wrote them, were published in a comprehensive collection. The poems quoted at the beginning of each chapter and the excerpts in chapters 5 and 13 are excerpts from that first edition of Emily’s work which may not always reflect Emily’s creative intent. However, they are in the public domain so they can be used freely here. “I’m Nobody, Who are You?” is quoted in its entirety. However the clues that Emily writes down in her secret notebook are fictional. Likewise Mr. Nobody did not exist and Emily Dickinson never investigated a murder.
The town of Amherst still resembles the town Emily knew. I took all the walks that Emily took—Amethyst Brook is a walk of a few miles out of town, and I, too, found Indian pipes along its banks.
Further Reading
If you are interested in Emily Dickinson, read her poetry! The poems are easily found online, and there are many collections available in your library.
The most comprehensive is The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Little Brown, 1960).
My favorite biography is My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Alfred Habegger (Modern Library, 2002). A wonderful pictorial biography is The World of Emily Dickinson by Polly Longsworth (W.W. Norton, 1997).
I also recommend a visit to the Emily Dickinson Museum. If you can’t go in person, it has a terrific website: http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/. It is full of interesting information and a “Poem of the Week.”
Another useful online location is the Amherst Public Library’s digital Emily Dickinson collection, http://www .joneslibrary.org/specialcollections/collections/dickin son/dickinson—print.html. You can see her shopping lists and samples of her poems. The library also has a wonderful digital collection about Amherst through the years at http://www.digitalamherst.org.
Copyright © 2013 by Michaela MacColl.
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