Few American writers are more intimately connected to a single house than Emily Dickinson was. Apart from brief trips to Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., the reclusive Dickinson did not stray far from her comfortable two-story residence in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she wrote nearly 2,000 poems. Only a handful were published in her lifetime, and all anonymously. The house, known as the Dickinson Homestead, and its contents—every sherry glass, quilt, and doll’s slipper—were the locus of her imagination. For Dickinson, the domestic and the literary form one seamless line. Last week, a public database cataloging all those family objects—more than 8,000 of them—went live. The unparalleled collection has been assembled by the Amherst-based Emily Dickinson Museum and stored in an undisclosed warehouse in Western Massachusetts. For the past year, museum staffers have unpacked, identified, stabilized, and photographed the items for future researchers. What this major offering won’t reveal is the circuitous, acrimonious story of who guarded the trove, and how it nearly disappeared.
Upon Dickinson’s death, in 1886, her sister, Lavinia, entered the poet’s room in the Homestead to clean out her effects. She was astonished to find sheet upon sheet of verse, some bound together with string, tucked away in a bureau. The family knew that Dickinson wrote poetry and had corresponded with a few writers and editors, but they had no idea how many poems she had produced. Vinnie asked Susan Dickinson, her sister-in-law, to help sort the verse for possible publication. Susan lived next door at the house called the Evergreens with Austin Dickinson and their children. She delayed, and Vinnie became impatient.
Vinnie then asked a neighbor, Mabel Loomis Todd, the artistic and ambitious wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor, for assistance. Todd agreed to help and enlisted the support of the poet’s longtime literary mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a writer Dickinson had reached out to after reading his work in The Atlantic Monthly, where he was a frequent contributor. The two went to work, transcribing the poems, making editorial decisions about word choice, adding titles, standardizing punctuation, and organizing the verse by theme. In 1890, Todd and Higginson produced the first volume of Dickinson’s poetry and introduced her to the world. Much to the dismay of Vinnie and Susan, Mabel Todd refused to return Dickinson’s manuscripts and kept poems in her possession for future editions. Mabel’s resistance was not unexpected. She was Austin Dickinson’s not-so-secret lover, and their relationship ignited a fury on all sides that smoldered for generations.