“Mrs Morene of Mexico”: A Todd-Johnson Misprint and Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona

In the spring of 1886, Dickinson wrote a letter to her beloved Norcross cousins posing the question: “Do you keep musk, as you used to, like Mrs Morene of Mexico?” (L1034). Although the allusion has gone unmarked, it is now clear that Dickinson was referring to Señora Gonzaga Moreno, the strong-willed matriarch of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, which Dickinson read the previous year (see L976). This article discusses both the importance of musk in the novel’s Southern California setting and the route of transmission that obscured Dickinson’s allusion. When Mabel Loomis Todd was editing the Dickinson-Norcross correspondence in the early 1890s, she was frustrated by the fact that the Norcross cousins would not let her examine their originals. Although Todd recopied some of the material they sent her, the printer’s copy for L1034 is in Frances Norcross’s hand, showing clearly that the mistranscription did not originate with Todd. How, then, did the substitution of an e for an o occur? This question cannot be answered definitively, but there are two possibilities: either the bed-ridden Dickinson made a transcription error, or the mistake was made by Frances Norcross, which the article suggests is likely. Dickinson’s allusion to Keats’s hopping bird in L1034 has been widely noted. The corrected reading of Moreno amplifies our understanding of her relationship with Jackson, of Jackson’s multivalent symbolism, and of Dickinson’s sensitive appropriation of literary texts.