"Yet the notion of Emily Dickinson making out in her living room is so foreign to our conception of her that her autumnal tryst with Judge Lord has never become part of the popular lore about her.
The discovery that Dickinson did not have to wait until her dotage to experience some of the pleasures of ordinary romantic companionship has so far sunk like a stone, too. A carefully argued scholarly article titled "Thinking Musically, Writing Expectantly: New Biographical Information About Emily Dickinson," published this summer in the staid New England Quarterly, has caused not a ripple.
The author, Carol Damon Andrews, is an independent scholar who has worked at the Worcester Art Museum in central Massachusetts. She told a reporter for the Amherst Bulletin that she was pursuing some family history among her Penniman ancestors when she stumbled across two intriguing entries in the diaries of Eliza Houghton Penniman, a music teacher who gave piano lessons in Amherst before settling in Worcester.
The first entry reads, in part: "I commenced teaching vocal & instrumental music when I was 16. My first pupils were Fanny Sellon daughter of Dr S. of Amherst … & lawyer Dickinson's daughter Emily." This was in 1839, when Emily Dickinson was 8 years old. Part of the understated charm of Andrews' article is that she gives as much attention to her discovery that Dickinson's musical education began six years earlier than had previously been supposed as she does to the bombshell that follows, in a later diary entry:
'In Amherst … I had a class in music: … Emily Dickinson, daughter of lawyer Dickinson, to whom Dr. George Gould of Worcester, was engaged when in college there. Lawyer Dickinson vetoed the whole affair, the Rev. George being a POOR student then, and poor Emily's heart was broken.'"
That Emily Dickinson wasn't just some weird old maid sitting in her room is a point I enjoy making to my students every semester--especially when we read a poem like "Wild Nights! Wild Nights!"--sent, in letter form, to her sister-in-law (!) who lived next door.
I look forward to reading all of Andrews' article, especially since I am very fond of the New England Quarterly, especially their December 2005 issue.
1 comment:
Dickinson rocks. I think that we're naive if we assume that we know everything about her life or her thoughts, or that we can know all that. For me, part of what makes Dickinson's poetry so amazing is the element of mystery--and the fact that, to some extent, it can mean anything (or everything). (Yes, I realize that this is true of pretty much all literature. Okay, all art. But Dickinson is still special!)
I just discovered a site (of which you're probably already aware, Heidi) from CUNY on Dickinson's poetry: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/dickinson.html
I like the explications of a bunch of the poems.
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