I've never got the hang of Emily Dickinson's poems. Not a terribly serious matter, you might think, but as I spent over twenty years teaching Victorian women's literature it's always seemed like a rather yawning gap. So I was really pleased when Virago sent me this biography. Lyndall Gordon is an extremely distinguished biographer and this book has been hugely praised so I plunged in with great enthusiasm, hoping I'd finally crack the poetry as well as learning about the life of this most famous but elusive poet.
And did I? Well, yes and no. I've taken ages to read it, mainly because initially I found I could only read a little at a time. Probably if I'd been a bit more familiar with Emily and her poetry I might have got on a bit faster, but I wasn't, so I had to go rather slowly and pause and think and put it aside and come back to it. But I say initially, because I absolutely whizzed through the second half of the book in record time. If that sounds a bit curious, it was because really this is a book of two halves, as by page 227, a little over halfway through, Emily has died, aged just 55. The remaining pages -- there are 397 of them in total plus copious notes -- tell the story of what happened to her poems after her death, and an extraordinary story it is, involving sexual passion, jealousy, divided families, court cases, hidden documents and more besides.
I've never read any of the various versions of Emily's life by the numerous biographers who preceded Gordon, but I suspect that this one is quite radical in some of its suggestions. Suggestions they have to be because this is a life lived in seclusion, and many of the facts will probably never be known. So, though it's clear that Emily had severe health problems, Gordon is the first to suggest that she probably suffered from epilepsy, and she makes a pretty good case for this, and in doing so also clarifies some puzzling passages in the poetry. Emily also emerges as a woman of great passion, and though Gordon hasn't been able to confirm the identity of the man she wrote to, and about, as 'Master', she certainly clears away some of the mist that has surrounded this episode in the poet's life, as well as writing interestingly and sensitively about Emily's later relationship with Judge Lord.
Fascinating though all this is, for me the book became absolutely unputdownable once we got onto the machinations surrounding the editing and publication of Emily's poems after her death. Here we are plunged into the extraordinary story of Mabel Loomis Todd, a beautiful, intelligent, powerful and ruthless young woman, and her intense, passionate relationship with Emily's married brother Austin. Married to the serially adulterous David Todd (who occasionally participated as a 'witness' in the sexual shenannigans of the lovers), Mabel got hold of a large number of Emily's poems and spent many years transcribing them and getting them published. In between times, she attempted to cheat Emily's sister out of a plot of land, and prayed incessantly for the death of Austin's long-suffering wife Susan. She never got her wish, but she did succeed in blackening the name and reputation of Susan Dickinson, who had been Emily's greatest friend and her first and most sympathetic reader.
It's impossible to like Mabel, but equally impossible not to admire her tenacity and to be grateful for her lifetime's work on Emily's poems, even if she did change them and 'correct' Emily's punctuation. But her feud with the family lead to many fudgings of the biographical facts which are only now being fully revealed.
As for Emily's poetry -- I am still puzzled by some of it, but I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel, and shall continue to read it in the hope that the penny finally drops.
