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Reviewed by:
  • Emily Dickinson: A Literary Life by Linda Wagner-Martin
  • Alfred Habegger (bio)
Wagner-Martin, Linda. Emily Dickinson: A Literary Life. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. $85.

Not forgetting Roger Lundin’s able attempt of 1998, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, there is a need for a short biography that provides a trustworthy account of Dickinson’s writing life: its stages and milestones; how family, friends, and correspondents played into the development and expression of her art; and what can be gathered from recent claims, insights, discoveries—a book, in short, that one can confidently recommend to readers at all levels. Linda Wagner- Martin’s brief biography is part of a series, Literary Lives, which, avoiding “the spirit of traditional biography,” as the general editor puts it, aims “to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts” that shape an oeuvre (i). The author, as the back cover tells us, has won numerous awards and produced fifty-three books. Is Emily Dickinson: A Literary Life the compact treatment we have been waiting for?

Fittingly enough, the book follows others in emphasizing the importance of Aunt Lavinia Norcross and her daughters in the poet’s life; the influence of the Dickinsons’ domestic help, Margaret O’Brien and Margaret Maher, on her productivity; the impress of the Civil War; and the roles played by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Otis Phillips Lord. In handling conundrums like the Master letters and the “terror—since September,” the author shows a commendable respect for indeterminacy. I rather like the treatment of grimness in the poems of 1866 and 1867, and I admire the diligence with which the scholarly record has been sifted (though Domhnall Mitchell’s Measures of Possibility is overlooked). But none of these praiseworthy achievements can disguise the fact that this is a distinctly unsatisfactory biography, one that goes off the rails so consistently that informed readers will find their patience severely tried. [End Page 120]

On page one we read that “if [the Edward Dickinson family] went abroad, which was unlikely, they traveled to England, France, and perhaps Italy (my italics).” On page six, in connection with Dickinson’s early interest in science, we meet the conjecture that as a girl or young woman “she saw some opportunities for employment” in the field. On page nine, it appears that her early teasing poem, “Oh the Earth was made for lovers, for damsel, and hopeless swain” (Fr1), was not sent to Elbridge G. Bowdoin, as the record shows, but to Benjamin Newton—an impossible supposition. The author interprets “I have a Bird in spring” (Fr4) as a troubled response to news of the engagement of Susan Gilbert, only to assert a few paragraphs later that by the time Emily wrote the poem she was “reconciled” to Sue’s plans. Indeed, “the poem is a kind of negligent dismissal” (16)—this about a lyric that puts the speaker’s tenacious attachment front and center. “Of all the Sounds despatched abroad” (Fr334) is said to be a poem “in memoriam for lost friends” (58). We learn that certain poems “appeared in what Dickinson labeled Fascicle I” (34), only to be advised at a later point that, “as R. W. Franklin makes clear, Dickinson never used the term ‘fascicle’ herself” (78). Further on, however, we find that a poem was “placed in what by this time Dickinson is calling ‘Set 6c’” (105).

As these quotations suggest, the book appears to be in a half-conscious fuguelike state. Each new topic and statement is so detached from previous points that the texture becomes chaotic and even incoherent. The author does not so much rehearse what is known about Dickinson’s life and work as run a line of hearsay, fantasy, and improbable guesswork around and above the facts. “I never hear the word ‘Escape’ / Without a quicker blood” (Fr144) inspires the reflection that “the poet might have welcomed the chance to leave her sorrowing home” (55)—a conjecture as otiose and literal as it is remote from the poet’s known preferences.

For aspiring Dickinson biographers, the existing commentary represents a huge challenge and a precious gift. They must try to distinguish what is useful and...

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