Coincidentally, as I was doing this, an interesting article about Dickinson’s death popped up on one of my news feeds – it’s about how the Dickinson’s housekeeper, Margaret Maher, might very well be the person who saved the poems from being burned (it was a typical practice in the 1800s for family’s to burn the personal effects of a deceased loved one).
From the article: “On her deathbed, at just 55 years old, Dickinson told Maher to destroy all of the poems she had stored in her trunk. Luckily, Margaret could not bring herself to fulfill Dickinson’s final wishes. She held onto the poems and brought them to Emily’s brother, who agreed that they needed to be kept safe.” The article – which begins with this line, “A world without Emily Dickinson’s poetry is almost unimaginable” – is HERE. Well, it’s too late for this, but looky what I found when I was looking up info on Margaret Maher, HERE. |
Yesterday I wrote about Margaret Maher, the Dickinson’s housekeeper who seems to be the one who disobeyed Emily Dickinson’s final directive to burn all of her poetry upon her death.
Here’s info from an article on Wikipedia:
Emily Dickinson stored her finished poems in her maid's trunk. The poet apparently instructed Margaret to burn these poems after her death but Margaret later refused. It was Margaret Maher "whom Emily Dickinson judged capable of the disobedience necessary to bring her work to the world. Maher did not disappoint. Her act of insubordination worked the miracle for which posterity is in debt, turning the private genius of her mistress's poetry into a universal legacy."
The quote from the article has a citation that brought me to this article, “In Service: Emily Dickinson, Helen Keller & the Irish Help” by Peter Quinn. In that article, Quinn points out that it was Maggie who “disobeyed Dickinson’s wishes and brought the poems to the attention of Lavinia instead of burning them, as Dickinson had requested. And so we owe our knowledge of the poet to her maid. In fact, the single daguerreotype by which the world knows Dickinson, the famous image of the sixteen-year-old taken in 1847, exists thanks to Maggie. Her family, thinking it a poor likeness, had discarded it. But Maggie rescued it.” The complete article is HERE. |
In a letter to a friend, Dickinson wrote of their housekeeper, “Maggie, good and noisy, the North Wind of the Family, but sweets without a salt would at last cloy.” More info is HERE. |