She grew frustrated with Susan’s slow progress, so she asked her brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd to help. Mabel agreed and enlisted the help of Dickinson’s friend and mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
As a result, a series of books were published in 1890, 1891, and 1896. These three volumes accounted for about 25% of Dickinson’s work – but then all work came to a halt.
In her 1945 publication “Bolts of Melody,” Todd’s daughter Millicent Todd Bingham wrote of Dickinson’s poetry, “Given to my mother by Lavinia Dickinson to publish, (but the work) halted on their way to the press by an imbroglio unrelated to literature….” Right: Mabel Loomis Todd Far right: Lavinia Dickinson |
So why did Todd decide to open that chest in 1929?
I can’t find any info at this point to explain exactly why she made that choice.
* In one article, I found this statement, that “(Lavinia) won the lawsuit but Todd refused to continue the project during Lavinia's lifetime.” However, Lavinia Dickinson died in 1899, and Todd opened the chest some 30 years later – so I don’t think Lavinia’s death had anything to do with the decision.
* Did Todd suffer from some malady where she knew she might be approaching the end of her life? Well, in 1929 she was 73 years old, so maybe age did play a part in her decision, but it was not due to any terminal illness. She died three years later of a cerebral hemorrhage on October 14, 1932.
* In another article I found this: “Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet's niece, inherited the poet's manuscripts from her mother Susan, except for those in Todd's possession. Between 1913 and 1937, she produced six books of Emily's poetry and two biographies, occasionally with assistance from Alfred Leete Hampton. Todd, upset at the rival publications and assuming only she had legal rights to Emily's works, released an updated edition of her compilation in 1931.”
Of course, any book published AFTER 1929 could not have been a factor in Todd’s decision to open that chest. 15 years earlier, in 1914, Bianchi published “The Single Hound,” a volume of poems by Dickinson so I doubt that was on Todd’s mind; however, in 1928 Bianchi published “Further Poems by Emily Dickinson Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia” – so it is very likely that this publication prompted Todd to act.
Whatever the reason, we know that Todd and her daughter unlocked that chest in 1929, and sixteen years later, all of those previously unpublished poems were finally in print.