Category: Mabel Loomis Todd

Canceled Check

5/28/2025

Yesterday I wrote about Dickinson’s poems which include the word May – both “may” the verb and “May” the month. Today, I have one more with “May” the month, and I thought I’d share it because it relates to some of my recent posts about Dickinson’s relationship with her sister-in-law Susan and the efforts made by some to erase Susan’s name from Dickinson’s history. The poem is “One Sister have I in our house.”

Dickinson scholar and editor R. W. Franklin wrote about this poem in his 1998 Variorum Edition of Dickinson’s poems:

“The sheets of this [poem] were whole when Mrs. Todd copied them, about 1889, but were mutilated sometime between then and 1891, presumably by Austin or Lavinia Dickinson, Emily's brother and sister. The intent was to destroy 'One Sister have I in the house', a laudatory poem about Sue, Austin's wife. To do so, the mutilator cut out two leaves from the packet and, dividing them into a number of pieces, canceled 'One Sister have I in the house' wherever it appeared on them" (Franklin, R.W. 1978. Three Additional Dickinson Manuscripts).”

By "canceled" Franklin means that the page was mutilated with heavy scribbles, making the lines unreadable.

He also discussed the poem in his 1967 book “The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration.” Some of his discussion of this poem and its mutilation is shown in the pages below. Click the images to enlarge.

Also, shown at the right is the poem as it appeared when it was first published in the 1914 edition of Dickinson’s poems, “The Single Hound,” edited by Mabel Loomis Todd.

Additional information about all of this can be found HERE.

Setting the Record Straight

5/24/2025

Yesterday I wrote about a perplexing comment made by Dickinson scholar Thomas Johnson about an underscore Dickinson added between the stanzas of a poem the poet sent to her friend Susan Gilbert when she was in New Hampshire visiting relatives:

“Poems (1896), 200, titled "Eternity"; LL 78-79. With Dickinson drawing a line between stanzas (significant for interpreting the identities of stanzas identified with ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers’).”

I really have no idea what that line would have to do with interpreting “the identities of stanzas” with “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.”

Anyway, in the latter part of his comments, Johnson also said the following:

“Sent to ‘Susie’ when she was visiting in Manchester, New Hampshire, who made two transcriptions, indicating perhaps that Sue made copies of Emily's work to send out. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, wrote that it was ‘The first verse Aunt Emily sent to Mamma - ‘ and says that it was ‘sent to Susan in 1848 when she was but eighteen. . . .’ but it was written five years later. This is the kind of misdating that Rebecca Patterson critiques as part of an effort to mask Emily's adult desire for Sue (The Riddle of Emily Dickinson, especially the first and fourth chapters).”

My post two days ago (HERE) was about efforts made by Mabel Lewis Todd (and/or Austin Dickinson) to “erase” Susan’s name from Dickinson’s poetry, letters – and reputation – and this comment indicated other efforts, above and beyond those of Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson, to misdate documents, mislead the public, and mask what might have been going on.

The person named in Jonson’s comment, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, was Susan Dickinson’s daughter, Emily’s niece.

The “campaign” to cover-up Dickinson’s desires for Sue (and for others?) is depicted in the 2018 romantic comedy “Wild Nights with Emily” (with Molly Shannon as Dickinson) – I remember a scene showing Mabel Loomis Todd (played by Amy Seimetz) in front of an audience so that she could “set the record straight.” (LOL – pun intended).

The film ends with titles explaining that recent technology revealed Mabel's erasures and that the love letters were indeed written to Susan.

All of this was front and center in the 1998 book Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith. However, you’ll notice in Johnson’s comment with which I opened this post, he mentioned Rebecca Patterson’s book, THe Riddle of Emily Dickinson – which proposed that Dickinson's great love was not a man but a woman, Catherine Scott Turner Anthon, the “Katie” of Dickinson's letters and poems – and that book was published in 1951.

More on this tomorrow – or soon. ;-)

So Sue Me!

5/22/2025

In March 1853, Austin Dickinson had traveled to Boston, and Emily Dickinson’s friend Susan Gilbert was in New Hampshire visiting relatives. Before returning to Amherst, Susan stopped by Boston to see Austin, and it was then and there that Austin proposed to her.

Yesterday (HERE) I mentioned a letter dated March 23, 1853, that Emily Dickinson wrote to her brother to congratulate him on his engagement.

That letter (HERE) opens, “Oh my dear ‘Oliver,’ how chipper you must be since any of us have seen you?”and in her book The Letters of Emily Dickinson, editor Cristanne Miller noted, “‘Oliver’ may allude to the young lover in ‘As You Like It,’ suggesting ED’s part as a go-between in Austin and Susan’s courtship” (and I spoke about that yesterday too).

Interestingly, five days earlier, before Austin Dickinson proposed to Susan at the Revere House Hotel in Boston, Emily Dickinson sent another letter to her brother, HERE, and Dickinson scholar and editor of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas Johnson, made this note, “An attempt has been made at some time to erase the words ‘and Sue’ in the first paragraph.” The full sentence with the erasure reads, “Your letters are very funny indeed - about the only jokes we have, now you and Sue are gone, and I hope you will send us one as often as you can.”

Who was it that tried to erase “Sue”?

Most current research points the finger at Mabel Loomis Todd, the first editor of Dickinson’s posthumous publication of Poems.

From 1882 until Austin's death in 1895, Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson had an extramarital affair, and most believe that Todd made efforts to suppress Susan Gilbert Dickinson's name from Dickinson's letters and poetry, particularly in the context of romantic or passionate references.

Todd was involved with the affair and in conflict with Austin’s wife, Susan, at the time of her editing work of Dickinson’s poetry and letters. However, some believe that Austin, too, might have had a hand in some of the erasures as well.

Some scholars argue that Todd's editing aimed to create a specific image of Dickinson as a solitary, perhaps asexual poet, rather than a woman with intimate, potentially romantic relationships with another woman (which certainly wasn't considered marketable in the 1890s).

Of course, that might be so – but why an erasure like the one in a sentence to her brother that reads, “Your letters are very funny indeed - about the only jokes we have, now you and Sue are gone"? An erasure like this sounds a bit more bitter and vengeful.

What do you think?

Loosey Goosey

5/18/2025

I have a log where I keep info on all of my Dickinson-related posts. I write down all the topics I’ve posted in the past, ideas for future posts, interesting quotes and bits of trivia, Dickinson-related sites and blogs, and even “loose ends” – ideas to revisit in the future that might be related to some past post.

Today I have a “loose end” – “Grand Rapids’ Emily Dickinson Connection” – but I can’t remember exactly to which past post this “loose end” connects. I’d typed out the following note beside a link I saved, “See letter to Sue at start of ‘A narrow fellow in the grass,” but none of this seems to make sense to me now.

Concerning the note I’d written to myself: In 1870 or as late as 1872, Dickinson sent a copy of “A narrow fellow in the grass” to her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, probably because Susan’s copy of the poem had been forwarded to The Springfield Daily Republican. That poem had been printed in the newspaper as “The Snake” on February 14, 1866 – it was one of the ten poems of Dickinson’s that was published during her lifetime – and Susan must have requested another copy of the poem.

When Dickinson sent the poem to Susan, she included news that the Norcross cousins were expected for a visit. Apparently Sue had sent over a note saying that she would like to make an evening call, so at the top of the poem, Dickinson wrote, “My Sue – Loo and Fanny will come tonight, but need that make a difference? Space is as the Presence –”

A copy of that complete letter/poem can be seen HERE.

According to the Dickinson archive,

“This is among the writings that strongly suggest that Sue and Emily's not seeing one another for long periods of time is a biographical construction based on unreliable gossip received as fact (e.g., stories told by Mary Lee Hall and recirculated by Richard Sewall in The Life of Emily Dickinson; Hall helped perpetuate tales of Dickinson's unrequited and/or unrealized love for a male suitor, felt particular animosity for Susan and her daughter Martha, and strongly allied herself with (Mabel Loomis) Todd and (Millicent Todd) Bingham.”

Sooo…on my log, next to a link about a connection to Grand Rapids, Michigan, I had typed a note to myself, “See letter to Sue at start of ‘A narrow fellow in the grass,” and now I can’t figure out why I wrote that.

The Grand Rapids’ link does have to do with Susan Dickinson’s family, but “Loo and Fanny” in the letter/poem to Susan Dickinson are not of that family, but of Dickinson’s mother’s family, the Norcrosses.

Anyway, the link is HERE, and I’ll touch on more of this tomorrow.

This Was A Poet

5/15/2025

Today marks the 139th anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death. She died on May 15, 1886 at the age of 55. The last letter she wrote to her cousins consisted of just two words, “Called Back” – and those two words are etched into her tombstone.

I wrote about that yesterday, HERE.

Interestingly, Mabel Loomis Todd gave Dickinson’s poem “Just lost when I was saved!” the title “Called Back” when she published it in the “Second Series” of the poet’s “Poems” in 1891.

For information about Dickinson’s death and funeral, check out this page from the Dickinson Museum’s site, HERE.
From that page, “Emily Dickinson was interred in a grave Sue had lined with evergreen boughs, within the family plot enclosed by an iron fence.” Pictures of the family plot are below.

I also found this travelogue (HERE) written by someone who had visited Amherst – including Dickinson’s gravesite – in 2002, and it makes mention of the plaque on the iron fence dedicated to the “poetess”: “‘The Dickinson Kinsfolk’ (members of the extended family, as no direct descendants of Squire Dickinson survived beyond 1943) enclosed the plot with an iron fence and affixed the plaque seen at right in 1954.”

Seriously? Was the term “poetess” being bandied about in the 1950s? I s’pose so!

I looked up the usage of the word and – to be honest – I’m not so sure I’m picking up what Google’s putting down here! LOL. Here’s what I found – and it suggests that the usage of “poetess” from the 1950s to 2019 declined only slightly? I mean seriously, who uses the word “poetess" these days?

And just FYI: Dickinson was writing poetry at that time of peak usage for “poetess” in the chart above. However, she wrote eight poems that included the word “poet,” and not a single one with the word “poetess” – and in the eight poems, she used both feminine and masculine pronouns in regards to the “poet." Just an observation.

In closing, here are the opening stanzas to Dickinson’s “This was a Poet” – and surely, the lines describe Dickinson’s gift:

This was a Poet –
It is That
Distills amazing sense
From Ordinary Meanings –
And Attar so immense

From the familiar species
That perished by the Door –
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it – before –

INFO FROM THE EMILY DICKINSON MUSEUM:

Today, we'll be remembering Emily Dickinson on the 139th anniversary of her death.
Here are a few ways you can honor the poet:

Share your favorite poem and tag the Museum on socials.
Plan your visit to the place she called home.
Make a supporting gift in honor of her poetic legacy.

In a remarkable obituary for The Springfield Republican, Susan Dickinson described her sister-in-law’s unique creative gift in these words: “A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit. Her swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see.”

Special thanks to all who supported the Museum by making a donation at our Poetry Walk. A daisy has been placed at Dickinson's grave for each of you and your loved ones.

Odd Numbers

3/24/2025

In 1891, the editor of New York’s The Independent published a favorable review of the newly published Poems by Emily Dickinson, and he then wrote to Mabel Loomis Todd requesting additional poems to publish in his paper. She sent him four, from which he printed three. One of the three was “God made a little Gentian.” I wrote about that poem earlier in the month, HERE.

That poem made me wonder how many works Dickinson wrote that include the word “gentian.”

When you search “gentian” on the online Dickinson archive, 15 entries pop up, and they represent seven different poems:

Distrustful of the gentian
God made a little gentian
It will be summer eventually
The gentian has a parched corolla
The gentian weaves her fringes
The springtime’s pallid landscape
While Asters

Of the seven poems listed above, the ones in bold appear in all of the major editions of Dickinson’s poetry – Johnson, Franklin, and Miller. However, “While Asters” appears only in Johnson and NOT in Franklin or Martin.

Also, the poem “The springtime pallid’s landscape” appears only in the 1896 publication of Poems (Third Series) edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, and it does not appear in any of the “complete” editions.

But all of this gets more than a little fuzzy, and it all has to do with the third poem on the list above, “It will be summer eventually.”

The poem “The springtime’s pallid landscape,” in Todd’s 1896 edition, is really just stanzas 2 through 5 of “It will be summer eventually.”

And then look at “While Asters.” This poem is just a variation of lines 14, 15, and 16 of “It will be summer eventually”; however, BOTH poems appear in Johnson, “While Asters” (poem number 331) and “It will be summer eventually” (poem number 342).

Those lines, by the way, were sent to Samuel Bowles around early 1862.

Sooo…depending upon the editions of Dickinson’s poems you check, the word “gentians” could be in 5, 6 or 7 poems.

Cover Letter

3/23/2025

Yesterday, I wrote about Dickinson’s poem “Of Tribulation, these are they,” one of four poems she enclosed in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in July 1862. The other three poems were “Your Riches taught me poverty," "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church," and "Success is counted sweetest."

The letter is a very well-known one in all of Dickinson’s correspondences; it is the one where she describes the way she looks:

“I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur- and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves-”

In much of the body of the letter, she discusses her role as his “scholar,” so that she might grow if not flourish in her work as a poet based on his feedback, and she also divulges more about her own personality (“I know the Butterfly, and the Lizard, and the Orchis – / Are not those your Countrymen?”).

Her talk of the work of the Surgeon calls to mind an allusion she made in her second letter where she thanked Higginson for the critique of her work: “Thank you for the surgery – it was not so painful as I supposed.”

In this, her fourth letter to the writer, she states “I shall bring you – Obedience…and every gratitude I know.” However, she states that she is looking for more than someone who will just “smile at me”; she stipulates “My Business is Circumference.”

Two things to note here: First, I just discussed the other day (on Pi Day) Dickinson’s use of the word “circumference” in her poetry (HERE); second, check out the meanings for “circumference” from the online Dickinson’s archive (HERE). In relation to this letter, take a look at meanings 6, 8, 11, 12 and 13.

Toward the end of the letter, she talks about her craft: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person.” In other words, when she uses the pronoun “I,” she does not mean herself.

Of course, this is obvious in poems like “I heard a fly buzz when I died” and “I felt a funeral in my brain,” but perhaps not so clear-cut in a poem like “If I can stop one heart from breaking / I shall not live in vain.”

In the penultimate paragraph, she states, “You spoke of Pippa Passes” – this is in reference to a verse drama by Robert Browning published in 1841 (info HERE).

At the end, she is grateful but uncertain how to thank Higginson: “To thank you, baffles me”... “had I a pleasure you had not, I could delight to bring it” – and she signs the letter “Your Scholar.”

Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson corresponded for roughly 23 years, starting in 1862 and continuing until Dickinson's death in 1886. The two only met twice, and Higginson also attended her funeral in the spring of 1886.

After Dickinson's death, Higginson collaborated with Mabel Loomis Todd to edit and publish the first collection of Dickinson's poetry.

Right Ankle?

3/22/2025

In 1891, the editor of New York’s The Independent published a favorable review of the newly published Poems by Emily Dickinson, and he then wrote to Mabel Loomis Todd to request additional poems to publish in his paper: “If there are any others that compare with the best ones in the volume, I should like much to publish them.”

Todd sent him four poems. He sent one back and said, “Three of them I will take and print as soon as I may. They are fresh and interesting. One of them I return. It seems to me so unsatisfactory in the way the last two verses are worked up. I am afraid I fail to catch the meaning except generally.”

In recent posts, I have shared information related to the three poems he accepted:

“I held a jewel in my fingers,” HERE.

“God made a little gentian,” HERE.

“Went up a year this evening,” HERE.

The poem he rejected was "Of Tribulation, these are they."

Dickinson included this poem in her July 1862 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, where she called attention to the misspelling of “ancle.”

That’s right – she deliberately spelled the word “ankle” as “ancle,” and she knew full well how to spell “ankle.” For one thing, she used the word “ankle” – and spelled it correctly – in “It sifts from Leaden Sieves.” Plus, on the copy of the poem she’d sent to Higginson, she wrote, “I spelled ankle wrong.”

It turns out that the word "ancle" (i.e., “ankle”) appeared in older editions of the King James Bible, specifically in Ezekiel 47:3 (describing water ankle-deep) and Acts 3:7 (referring to the strengthening of a man's feet and ankles).

Although modern translations now use the word "ankle" instead of "ancle,” Dickinson’s Bible used “ancle,” and the poem references this – and she knew that Higginson, a minister himself, would understand her message when she wrote to him, “I spelled ankle wrong.”

The discussion of the poem on “White Heat,” HERE, mentions that the poem also “borrows heavily from the Book of Revelation, chapter 7, a page that Dickinson dog-eared in her Bible.”

Tomorrow: More on the letter Dickinson sent Higginson. It’s a fascinating one!

These Are Her Letters to the World

3/18/2025

Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell have edited a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s letter. The New Yorker published an article about their book this week, HERE.

“A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,” wrote Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1869 – and in her lifetime she wrote hundreds of letters.

However, following Dickinson’s death, her sister Lavinia destroyed much of Emily’s correspondences as per “Emily’s direction.”

In 1930, Mabel Loomis Todd, co-editor of the first posthumous edition of Dickinson’s poems, wrote this in an article about “Emily Dickinson’s Literary Debut” for Harper’s Monthly Magazine:

“Soon after her death her sister Lavinia came to me, as usual in late evening, actually trembling with excitement. She told me she had discovered a veritable treasure – quantities of Emily’s poems which she had had no instructions to destroy. She had already burned without examination hundreds of manuscripts, and letters to Emily, many of them from nationally known persons, thus, she believed, carrying out her sister’s partly expressed wishes, but without intelligent discrimination. Later she bitterly regretted such inordinate haste. But these poems, she told me, must be printed at once.”

In 1958, Thomas H. Johnson published an edition of Dickinson’s letters where, in his introduction, he stated that – due to the poet’s reclusiveness – Dickinson “did not live in history and held no view of it.”

Fast forward to the New Yorker’s article. Its writer Kamran Javadizadeh points out that “Writing letters could…be for Dickinson not only a withdrawal from the world but also a way of extending herself into many worlds, all at once.”

In addition, “The nearly seven decades of scholarship that have followed Johnson’s pronouncement of Dickinson’s reclusiveness—scholarship to which Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, the new volume’s editors, have contributed and from which they adroitly draw—have revealed it to be a crude caricature, one that says as much about men’s fantasies about women (and about poetry readers’ fantasies about poets) as it does about the actual person who wrote those thousand-odd letters.”

One topic not covered in the article is Dickinson’s “Master Letters,” a set of three emotionally laden notes addressed to a figure whom Dickinson calls “Master,” but never names.

Are the Master letters included in the updated edition “The Letters of Emily Dickinson”?

Yes.

Here’s info from an appendix of the book:

“Dickinson referred to various people in letters and poems as ‘Master,’ including *Leonard Humphrey; *Thomas Wentworth Higginson (multiple times); and (once humorously) Austin. She also uses ‘Master’ to refer to God or Christ. Whether ED was writing a person, a fictitious character, or experimenting with language of desire and devotion in these drafts remains in debate.”

The letters are numbered 192 (on page 268), 282 (on page 324), and 299 (on page 332).

Emily Go Bragh!

3/17/2025

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to those who wear the green and/or drive snakes out of town!

In tribute to the foremost patron saint of Ireland, I thought I’d check a few SPD terms in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Did Dickinson ever use the word “shamrock”?

Nope.

However, she did use the word “clover” in fifteen poems – or sixteen if you count the 1890 version of “Like Trains of Cars on Tracks of Plush.” I think in that version, though, the word “clover” was added when editors Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson combined two of Dickinson’s poems into one.

Did Dickinson ever mention St. Patrick?

Nope.

How about Ireland (or “Eire”)?

Nope.

How often did she use the word “green”?

Dickinson used the word “green” in fifteen poems – but only fourteen if you check the Johnson edition of her “complete poems.” The poem “All overgrown by cunning moss” contains the word “green” in the Franklin edition of Dickinson’s poems, but NOT in Johnson’s edition.

The Miller edition includes both sets of stanzas and makes the following observation:

“May acknowledge the anniversary of the death of Charlotte Bronte (d. 31 March 1855), who published as Currer Bell and lived in Haworth. Line 1 echoes Bronte’s “Mementos” (1846): “all in this house is mossing over.” Gethsemane is the garden where Jesus prayed on the night before his crucifixion; asphodel flowers are associated with the Greek underworld, e.g. in The Odyssey. The “Or” between stanzas between 3 and 4 (where Miller indicated the alternate stanzas) may indicate that stanzas 4 and 5 are alternatives. In their single volume editions, THJ prints stanzas 1, 4, 5 and RWF prints stanzas 1, 2, 3.”