After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet by Julie Dobrow (review)

Millicent Todd Bingham led a difficult life. Her mother was a thrill-seeker, while her father was a philanderer. She was "an insecure, repressed and brilliant little girl who grew into an insecure, repressed and brilliant woman" (365). With loving attention to Millicent's plight, Julie Dobrow fills in gaps in an oft-told tale of illicit romance and erotic intrigue. After Emily is richly documented and makes the preservation of documents central to its story. Building on Polly Longsworth's Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd (1984), in which Millicent figures only tangentially, After Emily features Millicent as the star player in an absorbing drama of family and literary life, one in which Millicent's burdensome mission and "sacred trust" was "to set the record straight" (316, 338). Although Millicent eventually "eradicated certain documents so painful she wished to expunge them from the record of her life" (367), she zealously guarded the Dickinson manuscripts she had inherited from her mother, and after much travail she donated most of them to Amherst College, her father's alma mater, despite the intense pressure to which she was subjected to favor Harvard—see chapter 2, "Battling Over Emily's Papers (1946–1959)," and passim.

In brief, Millicent's mother, Mabel Loomis Todd, believed that she deserved to be not only compensated but honored for her editing work on Emily Dickinson's poems and letters and more generally for having inaugurated and contributed immeasurably to the poet's everlasting fame. Others saw it differently, including the poet's sister Lavinia, who successfully sued Mabel and her husband David (Millicent's father), for "misrepresentation and fraud" (175), Lavinia having changed her mind about a small strip of land she had assigned to both Todds for their friendship and for their work (mostly Mabel's) on editing the poet's manuscripts. After this sensational falling out with Lavinia and other members of the Dickinson family, including Austin's wife Susan, Mabel kept the Emily Dickinson manuscripts in her possession but did not consider herself a document thief because she felt that she was entitled to be compensated for her work, that the disputed land was hers because Austin Dickinson had given it to her, and—now here's the tricky part—she viewed herself as Austin's true wife and heir, ergo she was part of the Dickinson family. In her dreams, that's exactly what she was, "Mabel Loomis Dickinson." Overall, the elasticity of Mabel's conception of family served her well, but it damaged Millicent, whose relationship with her mother was, to say the least, complicated. Moreover, Millicent's father David Peck Todd, a distinguished astronomer and director of the Amherst College Observatory, shared Mabel's liberal interpretation of emotional reality.

As Dobrow recounts in chapter 7, "Losing Austin, Finding Mabel (1895–1905)," Austin Dickinson's death in 1895 was a turning point for fifteen-year-old Millicent, who later wrote that the day Austin died "put an end, among other things, to my childhood" (162). Dobrow explains, "Mabel's prolonged state of mourning and insistence on wearing black, as an ersatz widow, caused people around Amherst to whisper even more. (Mabel, for her part, wrote, 'the whole town weeps for him but I am the only mourner.')" Dobrow further explains that after Austin's death, "Mabel, slowly but with certainty, began to shift her dependence on Austin into reliance on Millicent," who assisted her in both her public and private lives (162–63).

On Mabel's multiple public agendas, and her editing work with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and on her own, see, for example, chapter 2 in my book Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference (2017). On Mabel's bitter rivalry with Austin Dickinson's wife Susan, see Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's...