"I'm Glad I Finally Surfaced": A Norcross Descendent Remembers Emily Dickinson

It is a pleasure to be part of this wonderful conference and a particular privilege to share with you some of my recent work on Emily Dickinson. I am here this afternoon with a detective story. And as with most mysteries, what you seek is not necessarily what you find.

Six years ago I spoke at the "Emily Dickinson In Public" conference at Amherst College on my research regarding the poet's Norcross cousins—Louisa and Frances—and their connections to the literary elite of Concord, Massachusetts. At that time I also speculated that Dickinson's wonderful letters to the "Little Cousins"—letters known for their intimacy and candor—may not actually be lost, as Millicent Todd Bingham conjectured in Ancestors' Brocades. You will remember Bingham suggested that Dickinson's letters to the Norcrosses were destroyed upon their deaths. My research proved otherwise and indicated that the letters indeed might still exist. What primarily led me to that possibility was information in Loo and Fanny's will that indicated that "articles" of a personal nature were to be given to another cousin, Anna Norcross Swett. Searching for the descendents of Anna Norcross Swett and the letter Loo and Fanny wrote that provided an inventory of those "articles" has been a literary detective hunt that has occupied a large part of the last four years.

Before describing that hunt, let me briefly reacquaint everyone with Anna Jones Norcross Swett and her relevance to Dickinson biography. Anna was Dickinson's first cousin, the daughter of Lamira and Joel Warren Norcross, the gregarious younger brother of the poet's mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson. Anna lived with her parents and younger brother William in Lynn, Massachusetts just north of Boston. After her mother's early death in 1862, Anna spent some time with Norcross relatives and resided for a while in 1864 with Loo and Fanny in their Cambridgeport boardinghouse—the same boardinghouse where the poet stayed while being treated for her mysterious eye disorder. After Joel Warren Norcross remarried, Anna returned to Lynn where she married Lewis G. Swett in 1877. The young couple moved to Riverside, California and tried their hand at raising fruit—raisins, oranges, and limes—and experimenting with a drying process they called "swetting." Joel Warren Norcross made trips to California in 1883 and 1885 to visit Anna and her family, a family which by 1880 included a son, Louis. When the fruit business proved not as profitable as they would have liked, the family returned to Massachusetts. Anna was preceded in death by her husband (1913) and son. (Louis was struck by lightning in 1930 while sitting in an easy chair in his living room). Anna died in 1939 at the age of eighty-four, leaving one granddaughter as her sole heir.

Just who was that granddaughter, a woman who would now be in her eighties? Had she married and changed her name? Where did she live? Death certificates, wills, business directories of Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts—all the flotsam and jetsam of biography—provided clues but no answers to the specific whereabouts of Anna's heir. I was left with only a name: Sylvia Swett. And an address of the family business from the 1930s: The Modern Shop of Lexington, Massachusetts.

"Follow the money," Watergate investigative reporters Bernstein and Woodward always commanded. A payment for grass cutting of the Norcross family cemetery plot revealed the granddaughter's married name, Sylvia Swett Viano. That name, combined with the Boston Globe death notice of Viano's mother, gave me a location to investigate. I called the local library in the city where Viano had last lived and asked if she were listed in the local telephone directory. She was. I wrote. And found the only heir of Anna Norcross Swett and the oldest living descendent of Emily Dickinson.¹

As I said, with mysteries what you seek is not always what you find. I did not find the Norcross letters. Viano knew of Loo and Fanny, but she knew nothing of a bequest to her grandmother from the Norcrosses. (I have...