EMILY DICKINSON IN LOVE: The Case for Otis Lord

Prologue: A Puzzlement

1 PROLOGUE: A PUZZLEMENT What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. Sir Thomas Browne hough she was a plain-looking woman, Emily Dickinson managed to interest and even fascinate a goodly number of men both young and old. Small and thin, standing barely an inch or two over five feet, weighing when young less than a hundred pounds—“like the Wren,” she described herself—by all accounts she had in her favor something more lasting than physical allure. At least on those men susceptible to a rare combination of wit, an impish charm of manner and mind, and sharp intelligence, it appears she exerted an instant, strong appeal. Still, as her niece recalled, she did have some pleasing, not to say striking, features. “Her dark, expressive eyes,” wrote Martha Bianchi, “with their tint of bronze, and Titian hair set off by her white skin, were always considered remarkable by others. Indeed the richness of her hair and eyes were her salient points, oftenest commented on. She had regular features, and her upper lip, a trifle long, gave her face a slightly ascetic appearance.” Living in a college town, two minutes’ walk from the main college buildings, with a father who was a high official of the school, all through her teen years and early twenties she and her sister entertained a steady parade of student visitors to their house. Three or four of these visitors, it is known, showed an interest in Emily, and for one of them, Henry Emmons, she eagerly returned that interest, his departure after graduation being her first love disappointment. There was also her father’s law student Ben Newton, who encouraged her poetic ambitions when Emily was not quite twenty, but who left Amherst to pursue his law studies. Her only definite, documented affair of the heart, that with the elderly widower Otis Lord, didn’t come until much later in life. It dates to her final eight or so years, when she was in her fifties. There was, however, an earlier attachment, the knowledge of which surfaced late: that with the mysterious, unidentified man she called “Master.” This still-veiled affair, occurring as she entered her thirties, has tantalized Dickinson readers and scholars for half a century , ever since three letters from her to him were found and published . It is that particular puzzle, long the dark, impenetrable center of Dickinson biography, that I some time ago set out to solve. It is true that certain impatient critics have insisted that the identity of Emily’s secret love, or whether he existed at all, is neither relevant nor important to her story, and especially not to her existence as an artist. That’s much too detached a view. A weighty emotional burden carried in resigned silence for some twenty years, giving a distorting wrench to normal hopes and dreams, is an urgent topic for study in anyone’s life. How much more in the life of a poet! My first offer of a solution appeared in my 1971 biography, The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson, there kept fairly short to fit the pattern of her whole life and artistic progress. In the following pages that early effort is much expanded, refined, and I believe strengthened. Herein Emily’s long-hidden, long-sought mystery lover is brought before the curtain at last, bathed in a bright spotlight and invited to take a bow, doffing his mask. But my purpose in these pages is not merely to uncover and confirm the identity of the poet’s “Master.” It is much more to fit that Prologue 2 information into the known events of her life, finally making good sense of facts long known but ill understood. Her extreme withdrawal from a normal existence, for example—where during her first thirtyfive years she had been an active, outgoing friend to many men and women—takes on some real meaning. Equally her strange decision to dress always in white comes into better focus, as does the curious episode of the eye trouble that occurred at the very start of her withdrawal. No accident was her spending so much time in Boston to have her ailing eyes treated when it might have been done as easily or better at home. More than with most such attempts to peel back the encrustations...