My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson VI

I've finally reached the end of this long biography, and here is the wrap-up.  

Her 1862-to-1865 period, when she first corresponded with Higginson, was probably her most productive. However, she remained reclusive and did not meet Higginson until 1870, when he visited Amherst. Fortunately, he wrote a detailed account of this visit. So much of this book is a recording of her interactions with family members and routine acquaintances that I found Higginson's impressions far more useful: he was a worldly outsider and far better positioned to make an objective evaluation. He found the household strikingly individualistic.

In the entry hall he heard a "step like a pattering child's & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair...in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl."...Twice he used the word "childlike." His hostess presented him with two day lilies as her "introduction," then asking him to "[f]orgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say," she began talking. She talked "continuously" but "deferentially–sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her"–and then resuming....he judged her to be "thoroughly ingenuous & simple." Although he doubted his wife would care for her, he considered much of what she said "wise."

"Her father was not severe I should think but remote."

"I was never with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her." Decades later, in a final attempt to sum up his impression, he availed himself of a newer psychological vocabulary: "The impression undoubtedly made on me was that of an excess of tension, and something abnormal." 

As Habegger notes, this is probably the best existing description of Dickinson and her household. Emily became increasingly reclusive as she aged, and she was only thirty-nine at the time of this visit. Higginson saw her only one other time, in 1873, and that appears to have been uneventful.

Edward, her father, died in 1874, at the age of seventy-one. In true patriarchal fashion, he left no will, and it was simply assumed that Austin would thereafter take control of the household, with the three women having no rights or inheritances. From here on, the book is mainly a sequence of deaths. In 1882, her probable "Master," the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, died. Emily came to know the popular judge, Otis Phillips Lord. He was about eighteen years older than her. His wife had died in 1877, and, after Emily's mother died in 1882, he apparently proposed to Emily. She did not accept. It's probably just as well, because he died in 1884. Emily herself died in 1886, at the age of fifty-five. At the time, the stated medical cause of death was basically mumbo jumbo. A more recent analysis suggests that she died from hypertension, which would certainly make sense.

 Austin was having an affair with Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) then. She was the wife of an astronomy professor at Amherst. She was a spirited person, liked sex, and had an open marriage – nothing like any of the Dickinsons. Todd worked with Higginson to produce the first book of Emily's poems. There has been criticism of their editing, but the book sold exceptionally well, and Emily's reputation as a poet was immediately established.

Habegger reproduces the entire title poem, which is about death:

My Wars are laid away in Books—

I have one Battle more—

A Foe whom I have never seen

But oft has scanned me o'er–

And hesitated me between

And others at my side,

But chose the best—Neglecting me—till

All the rest have died—

How sweet if I am not forgot

By Chums that passed away—

Since Playmates at threescore and ten

Are such a scarcity—

I've been thinking about the main influences on Emily Dickinson. Although she apparently admired Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her style is probably much closer to that of Emily Brontë. She also admired George Eliot, but George Eliot was vastly more knowledgeable than Emily – and a bad poet. While Emily seems to have been well-read – apparently she did like Henry David Thoreau – as a practical matter she was challenged by direct interactions with people, which excluded her from the kind of knowledge that makes good novelists. Still, I find some of Dickinson's poems to be remarkable little gems.