In regards to the family and the efforts to publish Dickinson’s poetry posthumously, complications (and outright feuds) developed on multiple fronts. First, Dickinson’s brother Austin engaged in a torrid love affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor. Later, Emily’s sister Lavinia Dickinson grew frustrated with her sister-in-law Susan’s sluggish work with editing her sister’s poems. Plus, not long after the publication of the early editions of Dickinson’s poetry, Lavinia took Mabel Loomis Todd to court over a parcel of land promised to the Todds by Austin Dickinson. And all of that just scratches the surface.
Below, left to right: Lavinia Dickinson, Susan Dickinson, Austin Dickinson, Emily Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd
For example, in an 1891 letter from Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Mabel Loomis Todd, Higginson wrote about a typo discovered by Susan Dickinson in the poem “I know some lonely houses off the road”: “Mrs. Dickinson thinks ‘a pair of spectacles afar just stir’ should be ‘ajar’ as in her MS. If you approve please notify Mr. Niles” (the publisher rep with Roberts Brothers, the company which printed and distributed the first edition of Dickinson’s poetry).
Susan Dickinson did, in fact, bring the “afar”/”ajar” misprint to Higginson’s attention – and Millicent Todd Bingham, Mabel Loomis Todd’s daughter, wrote about this in her 1945 account of her mother’s work in editing and publishing Dickinson’s work:
“Sue was right about the spectacles. But instead of calling the mistake to the attention of her neighbor (i.e, Mabel Loomis Todd), Mrs. Dickinson had notified Colonel Higginson. It may seem a trivial matter to have approached in so roundabout a way – writing to a distant gentleman whom she did not know in order to reach an editor close at hand. But it cannot be repeated too often that no mistake was overlooked as an occasion for blame. In spite of the welter of Dickinson animosities in which my mother was involved, however – any by now she and Sue were not on speaking terms – she was able to detach herself sufficiently to acknowledge that Sue had caught her in a mistake. It was corrected in the next edition of the book.”
Yes, the correction was made. But things only got hotter.