Nobody's Secret (23 page)
Fewer than a dozen of Emily’s poems were published during her lifetime. And those that were published weren’t popular, as many people couldn’t see past her odd spelling and unique punctuation (for instance, she used dashes frequently in place of standard periods or commas). Today, these elements are part of what people love about her poetry—to the twenty-first-century reader, her punctuation feels fresh and modern.
Emily’s poems inspired this story, especially “I’m Nobody! Who are You?,” which is about how enticing anonymity might be in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business. The first chapter is all about bees because bees feature in more than fifty of her poems. She was also intrigued by death, loss, and loneliness. That her poems portrayed so much—and such varied—emotion made the task of choosing a poem to reflect the emotional content of each chapter of my book surprisingly easy.
Emily’s powerful poetry is all the more extraordinary given how quiet her life was. Born in 1830, she lived her entire life in Amherst, Massachusetts, except for one year of school in Northampton, only ten miles away. She died at the age of fifty-five from liver disease in the house where she lived most of her life.
The one surviving photograph of Emily Dickinson was considered a poor likeness; it was too plain and severe. Small wonder that she preferred to craft her own self-portrait in words. She wrote, “I 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.”
Emily was the middle child between her brother, Austin, and her sister, Lavinia (“Vinnie”). Austin was her closest confidant, and she missed him terribly when he went away to school. The sisters were close, but very different. While Emily was partial to birds, Vinnie preferred cats. Vinnie was the more vivacious of the two. Young men from Amherst seemed to prefer flirting with Vinnie, but Emily was the one they preferred to talk to.
Emily’s father, Edward, was a successful lawyer, politician, and an official of Amherst College. Although he educated his daughters, there was no question of their becoming “literary.” Girls in the nineteenth century (and well into the twentieth) were expected to manage the responsibilities of a household. As Emily tells Mr. Nobody, her father bought her books, but discouraged her from reading them in case they put ideas in her head. Please note that the letter in the novel from Mr. Dickinson is fictional, although typical of the way he wrote to his family.
Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, was far less concerned with Emily’s education than with her poor health. She also worried about the family finances, particularly since her father-in-law had spent the family fortune to found Amherst College. Mrs. Dickinson always claimed that Mrs. Child’s
The American Frugal Housewife
had enabled her to make ends meet, and often quoted it to her exasperated daughters.
For eight years, Emily attended Amherst Academy, where she studied botany with Almira Lincoln Phelps, one of the most notable botanists of the time. Miss Phelps encouraged Emily to keep a herbarium, a large book in which to keep her pressed flowers and plants. Unusually, the girls at the academy were permitted to attend lectures by the most distinguished scholars of the day at the all-male Amherst College. Emily’s poems are filled with references to her study of chemistry, astronomy, and geology.
Although she had suitors, Emily never married. She remained in her family home, caring for her parents and the house. She hated housework, calling it a “pestilence,” although she enjoyed the chemical combustion involved in baking. Her recipes won prizes at a local fair.
In my novel, I tried to show how time-consuming and tedious cooking was for Emily and her sister. Research indicates that Emily increased her output of poems whenever the family had full-time help, and dropped off when they didn’t.
Since Emily spent so much time in the kitchen, many of her poems were written there, jotted down on any scrap of paper, even the backs of bills and advertisements. Eventually she transferred her poems, which often had many versions, to handmade books made of folded paper and fastened with string, called fascicles. Though there is no evidence that she kept such a notebook hidden in her corset as she does in the novel, it seemed plausible to me.
Some of Emily’s fascicles have been preserved, and may be seen at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst. The museum is located in the Homestead, her family home. She was born there, but financial troubles forced the Dickinsons to leave the house when she was nine. They moved to a house on North Pleasant Street, adjoining the cemetery. The family lived there until Emily’s father managed to repurchase the Homestead when Emily was twenty-five.
My story takes place during the time they lived on North Pleasant Street. Emily is now buried in the cemetery she could see from her bedroom window. Unfortunately, this house is long gone and has been replaced by a gas station, but pictures of it still exist.
The gentlemen Emily enlists as allies, Reverend Colton and Dr. Gridley, were close friends of the Dickinson family, but the Wentworths and the Langstons are pure invention.
As a teenager, Emily had an active social life in Amherst. She went to teas, sewing circles, fairs, and sleigh rides with friends. Far from avoiding society, as she did later in life, as a teen she longed for it and stayed home only to nurse her ill mother. The scene where Henry surprises Emily in the kitchen was inspired by a letter she wrote to a friend complaining that she could not go riding with a dear friend because her mother was ill.
She wrote, “A friend I love so dearly came and asked me to ride in the woods, the sweet-still woods . . . I told him I could not go . . .”
Then she wrote, “I went cheerfully round my work, humming a little air till mother had gone to sleep, then cried with all my might.”
Emily’s schoolfriends could not keep up with the fierce intelligence she expressed in her letters to them. As she entered her twenties, her social circle shrank to the family and very close family friends. However, she expanded her correspondence to include some of the great thinkers of the time.
By the time Emily was thirty, she had become a recluse, rarely leaving her home, and she wore only white cotton housedresses. Because they rarely saw her, the townspeople began to refer to her as “Myth” or the “Woman in White.”
A few of her poems were published in local newspapers without her permission. Emily was furious that her punctuation and spelling had been “corrected” and refused to consider publishing again, although she shared many of her poems with family and friends. Yet no one in her limited circle suspected how much she was writing.
After Emily’s death, Vinnie was shocked to find more than 1,800 poems among Emily’s things. Always her sister’s champion, she arranged for them to be published. Emily would have been dismayed to see that the editors once again altered her punctuation, titled her poems, and even changed words to improve the rhymes. But she might have smiled to see that the cover was illustrated with Indian pipes, her favorite flower.
Despite the editors’ meddling, the poems were a critical and commercial success, establishing Emily as a major poet. It was not until 1955 that her original poems, exactly as she wrote them, were published in a comprehensive collection. The poems quoted at the beginning of each chapter and the excerpts in chapters 5 and 13 are excerpts from that first edition of Emily’s work which may not always reflect Emily’s creative intent. However, they are in the public domain so they can be used freely here. “I’m Nobody, Who are You?” is quoted in its entirety. However the clues that Emily writes down in her secret notebook are fictional. Likewise Mr. Nobody did not exist and Emily Dickinson never investigated a murder.
The town of Amherst still resembles the town Emily knew. I took all the walks that Emily took—Amethyst Brook is a walk of a few miles out of town, and I, too, found Indian pipes along its banks.
Further Reading
If you are interested in Emily Dickinson, read her poetry! The poems are easily found online, and there are many collections available in your library.
The most comprehensive is
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson,
edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Little Brown, 1960).
My favorite biography is
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson
by Alfred Habegger (Modern Library, 2002). A wonderful pictorial biography is
The World of Emily Dickinson
by Polly Longsworth (W.W. Norton, 1997).
I also recommend a visit to the Emily Dickinson Museum. If you can’t go in person, it has a terrific website: http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/. It is full of interesting information and a “Poem of the Week.”
Another useful online location is the Amherst Public Library’s digital Emily Dickinson collection, http://www .joneslibrary.org/specialcollections/collections/dickin son/dickinson—print.html. You can see her shopping lists and samples of her poems. The library also has a wonderful digital collection about Amherst through the years at http://www.digitalamherst.org.
Copyright © 2013 by Michaela MacColl.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
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ISBN 978-1-4521-2438-4
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