Category: Authors

This piece is the second in a series of articles examining Emily Dickinson’s life, work, legacy, and enduring significance in poetry and popular culture. Read the first part here.

Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, or Vinnie, as she was fondly called, lived most of her life in the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born. Beautiful, loyal, curious, and vivacious, she devoted her time to housework and keeping the machine going. Of her, her niece, Martha Dickinson once wrote: “Upon her, very early, depended the real solidarity of the family”.

She had to, especially when her mother succumbed to grief after her father passed away in 1874. She never wed, and after her mother too had passed, she took care of her sister, Emily, a recluse who would one day make a name for herself in the world and leave behind a rich and enduring legacy of the Dickinson name.

Vinnie’s sister would one day rise up to become one of the most celebrated poets and one of the most exceptional minds of English literature. Emily Dickinson would one day take over the world with her words, even though she would not herself be around to see it. But it is a little-known fact, that the genius of Emily Dickinson might have not seen the light of day when it did, or at all, had it not been for sweet Vinnie.

An Extraordinary Poet & (not) a Recluse

While Vinnie devotedly cooked and cleaned and kept the Homestead in order, her older sister Emily sat at her desk in her room and scribbled furiously as ideas poured out of her head in the form of exquisite poetry. While many misconstrue her as The Woman in White or a lonely woman, she had lived a full life.

She had correspondences with writers and poets, and a network of friends and family who supported her and loved her. She shared a special love with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, wife to Austin Dickinson, who lived in the neighboring house, the Evergreens.

In one of her letters, she writes, 

“To own a Susan of my own

Is of itself a Bliss – 

Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,

Continue me in this!”

Emily wrote even when her eyes became weak and even when poor health grappled her sweet soul. Living a blissful solitary existence in her homestead, Emily wrote and she wrote until her fingers burned. In her last few years, she would rarely go out. Beset with a great number of personal tragedies and losses, and in helping Vinnie share the load of housework, her writing seemed to get more disorganized and frantic. She no longer collated her poetry in her booklets. She wrote on bits of paper, and she wrote on scraps, in a haste unlike any. She wrote until her health failed.

Before passing in the May of 1886 after more than two years of ill health, she requested Vinnie to burn her letters and correspondences.

The Chance Discovery of a Genius

Vinnie stood alone in the home she had known all her life, all alone, grieving for the loss of her sister who she had loved and protected all her life. She burned the letters and tried to make sense of the acute loss she had suffered in recent years. That is when she found them.

Now, Emily had been published before, anonymously and not, but not much of her work had reached beyond a certain few circles. Vinnie found hundreds of her sister’s poems, most of which were not read by eyes any other than Emily’s own. Her late sister had left no instructions as to what fate she wished for her words.

Vinnie took a decision. Her sister’s words would be published. The sheer brilliance of her work deserved its chance in the sun. Vinnie loved her sister. Within the next few years, Vinnie made all efforts conceivable to publish Emily’s work. She wasted no time in collecting her works and making sense of hundreds of scraps of paper her sister had left behind. She wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a revolutionary abolitionist, writer, and women’s rights movement supporter, Emily’s dear friend, frequent correspondent, and one of her staunchest supporters, in 1890: “I have had a ‘Joan of Arc’ feeling about Emilies poems from the first.”

Due to her efforts, Higginson, who co-edited the first publication, and Mabel Loomis Todd, wife of an Amherst College professor and a celebrated artist, Poems of Emily Dickinson (the first series) was put to print in 1890, four years after the author had passed away.

Vinnie’s chest swelled with pride and she stood with her brother and Susan, her nephew and nieces, and Higginson and Todd. Poems though, did not even collect a small fraction of the material Emily had written over her lifetime. There was much work to be done. All of Dickinson’s work would not be collated until 1955, several editions later, when Thomas H. Johnson, a literary scholar would compile it all and edit the original manuscripts to publish The Poems of Emily Dickinson long after Vinnie and Higginson and Todd had all passed away. For now, tears streamed out of Vinnie’s determined eyes and she sat on the bed her sister slept on in the room her sister never left with a copy of Poems in her hand. This wasn’t the beginning, but it was a beginning. Emily Dickinson was well known enough in the town of Amherst, but soon, the entire world would know her sister’s name.

This piece is the first in a series of articles examining Emily Dickinson’s life, work, legacy, and enduring significance in poetry and popular culture. Read the next part here.

Emily Dickinson thought of death quite a bit. She wrote of it extensively too, with poems like “Because I could not stop for Death”, “I felt a funeral in my brain”, and “A coffin is a small domain”. Her words are punctuated by short phrases, idiosyncratic vocabulary, metaleptic punctuation, and vivid imagery, and her work is transcendental, of immense wit and intellect, capturing the zeitgeist of being a woman in the nineteenth century. Despite her ruminations on god, the nature of immortality and death, and ponderings on spirit and mind, she wrote with a refreshing verve and insight. Her words are a source of comfort today.

1.

“A Coffin — is a small Domain,
Yet able to contain
A Citizen of Paradise
In it diminished Plane.”

The trees of the West Cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts sigh languidly on a lazy summer day as a gust of wind blows through their leaves. A feather rode the tides of the wind and swam through the air. The summertime haze lifted in the cemetery on Triangle Street and quickly, the feather frolicked its way through the gravestones and the trees. The day was strangely alive and the cemetery was occupied by a bunch of visitors across the 4-acre plot.

An iron fence separates some graves from the rest around which a throng of people stood. Miraculously, the feather swam above their heads, and just as sudden as the gust that had lifted it up originally, the wind died. The feather fell with a soft moan near the marble slab that was cool to touch in the balmy breeze, soft like a kiss. On it was engraved: “Emily Dickinson. Dec. 10, 1830. Called Back. May 15, 1886.”

The ground has memories, the soil remembers. May 19, 1886. It remembers the small funeral procession in the Dickinson Homestead. It remembers how the procession started at the parlor of the Homestead, then circled the poet’s flower garden and as per her own instructions, went through the house barn and through a grassy path lined with buttercups to the cemetery on Triangle Street. It remembers the beautiful white coffin and it remembers a grave lined with evergreen boughs laid by a loving heart and a trembling hand by Susan Gilbert Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson had breathed her last.

A small, yet intimate gallery of personas had gathered, who had loved this woman or seen her grow up. Austin and Susan Dickinson, her brother and sister-in-law held each other in their arms and watched her being lowered into the grave to begin the next great journey of existence. Susan would later write her obituary in The Springfield Republican, “A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit. Her swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see”.

2.

“A Grave — is a restricted Breadth —
Yet ampler than the Sun —
And all the Seas He populates
And Lands He looks upon”

Lavinia Dickinson, the youngest sibling, sat upright beside them, shaking. She had no inkling of the idea that she would find a vault of thousands of poems by her late sister later. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily’s close friend and a fierce champion of her poetry was somber. He could not get the face of his friend out of his mind, sneaking a glance before they closed the coffin. He had read Emily Bronte’s poem, “No Coward Soul is Mine” at the service and smiled when he saw her lay peacefully in white clothes as if she slept.

He remembered the first words he ever read from her in a letter, “MR. HIGGINSON, — Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” It felt like that had been ages ago. He would later write, “E.D.’s face a wondrous restoration of youth – she is 54 [55] & looked 30, not a gray hair or wrinkle, & perfect peace on the beautiful brow. There was a little bunch of violets at the neck & one pink cypripedium; the sister Vinnie put in two heliotropes by her hand ‘to take to Judge Lord’.”

After Emily Dickinson was lowered into her eternal resting place in the earth’s loving embrace, a gravestone was erected with her initials, E.E.D. Years later, her niece, Martha Dickinson would change it to the white marble stone etched with the title of the Hugh Conway novel (“Called Back”), which still stands today.

3.

“There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.”

Emily Dickinson was a poet, a supposed recluse, an untethered free spirit. The woman in white. She wrote of immortality and legacy and hope, and yes, death. She wrote of funeral possessions and wild nights and bees and devotion. She was a revolutionary, a woman ahead of her own time, who wrote of her fears, aspirations, and beliefs with brazen honesty. Above everything else, she was loved.

She is laid to rest now in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she had lived all her life, with the rest of her family. Her words stay alive though, now more than ever. She did not see her words read by many before she passed, but her legacy endures.

Her life may have been short, but her words are eternal.

Acknowledgement: Each sub-section of this article begins with a verse from Emily Dickinson’s poem, “A Coffin is a Small Domain.”