After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet

by Julie Dobrow

Overview

The untold story of the extraordinary mother and daughter who brought Emily Dickinson’s genius to light.Despite Emily Dickinson’s world renown, the story of the two women most responsible for her initial posthumous publication—Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham—has remained in the shadows of the archives. A rich and compelling portrait of women who refused to be confined by the social mores of their era, After Emily explores Mabel and Millicent’s complex bond, as well as the powerful literary legacy they shared.Mabel’s tangled relationships with the Dickinsons—including a thirteen-year extramarital relationship with Emily’s brother, Austin—roiled the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts. After Emily’s death, Mabel’s connection to the family and reputation as an intelligent, artistic, and industrious woman in her own right led her to the enormous trove of poems Emily left behind. So began the herculean task of transcribing, editing, and promoting Emily’s work, a task that would consume and complicate the lives of both Mabel and her daughter. As the popularity of the poems grew, legal issues arose between the Dickinson and Todd families, dredging up their scandals: the affair, the ownership of Emily’s poetry, and the right to define the so-called "Belle of Amherst."Utilizing hundreds of overlooked letters and diaries to weave together the stories of three unstoppable women, Julie Dobrow explores the intrigue of Emily Dickinson’s literary beginnings. After Emily sheds light on the importance of the earliest editions of Emily’s work—including the controversial editorial decisions made to introduce her singular genius to the world—and reveals the surprising impact Mabel and Millicent had on the poet we know today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393249262
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/30/2018
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	117,074
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Julie Dobrow is a professor with appointments in the department of Child Study and Human Development and the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University and serves as director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. Her writing has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine and the Huffington Post, among other publications. She lives outside of Boston.

Table of Contents

1886 Map of Amherst x

Preface xiii

Introduction One Fine Day in May (1886) 1

Chapter 1 Arriving in Amherst (1856-1881) 9

Chapter 2 Meeting and Courting the Dickinsons (1881-1882) 29

Chapter 3 Soaring Love and Seething Tensions (1883-1894) 53

Chapter 4 Dickinsonian Inspiration: Mabel's Creative Output (1883-1893) 82

Chapter 5 Lingering Puritanism and Millicent's Sensibilities (1884-1897) 92

Chapter 6 Embracing Emily's Poems (1886-1897) 111

Chapter 7 Losing Austin, Finding Mabel (1895-1904) 158

Chapter 8 Suing the "Queen of Amherst" (1897-1898) 176

Chapter 9 Traveling and Travails (1899-1917) 192

Chapter 10 "Sincerely, Joe Thomas" (1918-1919) 210

Chapter 11 Fighting to Define Emily Dickinson (1920-1929) 224

Chapter 12 Bringing Lost Poems to Light (1930-1939) 245

Chapter 13 Dealing with "Dickinsoniana" (1940-1955) 272

Chapter 14 Battling over Emily's Papers (1946-1959) 295

Chapter 15 Seeking Closure and Meaning (1960-1968) 325

Chapter 16 Unpacking the Camphorwood Chest 342

Afterword Sorting through the Clutter 363

Acknowledgments 371

Notes 379

Text Credits 409

Illustration Credits 411

Index 417

Editorial Reviews

05/28/2018
Tufts University professor Dobrow chronicles the lives of two of Emily Dickinson’s earliest champions and editors, the mother-daughter team of Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, shining a light on how they shaped “the contours of poetry as we know it today.” Mabel, an author, was also the longtime lover of Dickinson’s brother, Austin, bringing her into conflict with Austin’s wife, Sue, and Emily’s sister, Lavinia. These feuds frequently stalled publication of Dickinson’s work and, as Mabel neared the end of her life, she implored Millicent to continue working on the poet’s as-yet unpublished output. Dobrow authoritatively traces the tortuous editorial and publication process that first brought Dickinson’s work to public attention, and sensitively explores her subjects’ interior lives, showing how Mabel suffered from being the other woman in Austin’s life and how Millicent struggled growing up in her charismatic mother’s shadow. Quotes from Mabel’s diary demonstrate her intuitive understanding of Dickinson’s greatness, such as when she declared that the poems “seemed to open the door into a wider universe.” Impeccably researched using more than 700 boxes of the Todds’ personal documents, Dobrow’s narrative gives a fascinating glimpse into the lives of two tireless advocates for Dickinson’s work, demonstrating how poet and editors alike were “all women pushing up against the boundaries of their times.” (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Julie Dobrow has grabbed a tiger by the tail in her skillful reanalysis of Mabel Loomis Todd’s role in recognizing, preserving, publishing, and promoting Emily Dickinson’s powerful poetry…Dobrow weaves the vitality of the personal into her scholarship, surprising and enlightening readers about one of America’s greatest literary rescues.

Polly Longsworth

An honest, sometimes searing portrait of the two idiosyncratic women, mother and daughter, who between them delivered Emily Dickinson’s 'letter to the World'— rescuing this genius hermit from obscurity bydeciphering and publishing her sheaves of high voltage poetry…Riveting, unblinkered, sad, and brave, After Emily makes the case for these two posthumous amanuenses as urgent agents of critical work we came so near to losing.”

Gregory Maguire

Dobrow has succeeded in illuminating more fully than ever before the intricate net of desires, both conscious and unconscious, that led Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham to undertake the editing of Emily Dickinson’s writings. In Dobrow’s rendering, biography fuses with American tragedy. After Emily is a book for and of our time: a meditation on the nature of agency and the role of affect in women’s lives and writing.”

Marta Werner

The entire nuanced and complicated story of Mabel Loomis Todd, Millicent Todd Bingham, and Emily Dickinson is ours at last in this diligently sourced and compellingly written history.

Marianne Curling

★ 2018-06-27
An elegant recovery of the two women without whom "Because I could not stop for Death" likely wouldn't be required reading for American high school students.During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) didn't publish much, but after she died, her brother's mistress took up the cause of Dickinson's verse. Mabel Loomis Todd is one of the stock characters of the Dickinson story. Dobrow (Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies/Tufts Univ.) spent years in the massive Todd archives—Yale's Sterling Library holds more than 700 boxes of diaries, journals, and notes about psychiatric sessions—in order to recount, with sympathy and nuance, Todd's near-obsession with editing Dickinson, securing a publisher, and publicizing the poet on the lecture circuit. While telling Todd's story, the author sensitively explores the (much-criticized) editorial choices Todd made and the question of who was responsible for the "legend" of Emily-the-recluse-in-white. Less well known than Todd is her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, who completes Dobrow's twinned biography. Bingham grew up immersed in her mother's obsession with Dickinson: "Initiation into the vagaries of Emily's handwriting is one of the earliest rites I can recall," she once said. As an adult, she took over the work, publishing yet-unseen poems and letters and delving into arguments about copyright and archive battles. (Dobrow manages to make wrangling between university libraries fascinating.) The author reduces neither woman to her devotion to Dickinson. She attends to their professional accomplishments, world travels, marriages, and passion for conservation. The book, then, is about the Belle of Amherst, but it is also about being a working woman, a mother, and a daughter.All entries in the voluminous literature on Dickinson are controversial—some will bristle at such a positive depiction of Todd or suggest that some of Dickinson's relatives deserve more charity or credit. One hopes the controversy will simply bring increased attention to Dobrow's fresh, remarkable account.

Kirkus Reviews

★ 08/01/2018
(1830–86) would not be known as America's Greatest Poet. Here, Dobrow (Ctr. for Interdisciplinary Studies, Tufts Univ.) tells the women's stories. As a family friend of the Dickinsons in Amherst, MA, Mabel was introduced to Emily's poetry, which she found quite powerful. Complicating matters, Mabel began a decade-long affair with Emily's also-married brother, Austin. Following Emily's death, Mabel worked hard to get her poetry into print and succeeded, which led to long-lasting personal and legal feuds with Emily's heirs. Millicent sought her own path, free from her mother's entanglements, including the poet's oeuvre, but her own intellectual interests as a geographer soon played second fiddle to Emily and her legacy when a cache of hidden manuscripts was revealed. VERDICT The biographical material related to Emily Dickinson's legacy is the work's driving force, but Dobrow's skillful account of Mabel's and Millicent's lives makes this page-turner a must-read for the poet's most ardent fans.—Brian Flota, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA

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