Quotes from Lyndall Gordon

Two formidable difficulties at once presented themselves: half the correspondence—the letters Dickinson received—had been destroyed and her own letters are undated after 1855.

Given the array of correspondents—Abiah Root, Mrs Holland, Sam Bowles, Maria Whitney, Mabel Todd herself and many minor figures—a distorting omission is the correspondence with Susan. Nowhere is she mentioned. It's a common temptation to editorial power to contrive a bias, sometimes in covert ways. Here the agenda is all too plain.

Another intense relationship was kept under wraps. No letters to Judge Lord were published for half a century, and by that time the renunciatory legend was so firmly established that Emily's delight in the Judge's visits and her candour about desire have been underplayed.

Austin required all reference to sickness be cut. Consistent with secrecy was the refusal of the Norcross sisters to let Todd see the letters in their possession. These remaining witnesses to Emily's ills in her teenage years, and to the treatment she endured in Boston in 1864 and 1865, shielded their cousin from biographical intrusion.

Life is not a straight and endless stairway, the steps of which we tick off as we go smugly on, but a forest of wandering paths

Mabel's skills as an actress who is the first to believe her words as they issue from her mouth.

the clash between Austin Dickinson and his wife, who had been the poet's intimate and her keenest reader. Out of this clash a lasting feud developed, and it was the opponents in this feud, their allies and warring descendants, who devised the image of the poet as her fame grew and endured.

Lavinia insisted that Todd's preface should include a statement that Emily Dickinson's sister had collected the letters. Todd, unaccustomed to submit on demand, persuaded Roberts Brothers to reprint the letters with a different version of that sentence. It was to say that Emily Dickinson's sister had asked Mabel Loomis Todd to collect her letters, implying Todd alone had done the job.

a feud over who was to own the poet: in the first instance, who was to have the right to publish her works; in the second, whose legend would imprint itself on the public mind.

To approach Emily Dickinson through the feud, to search out why it happened and to follow its consequences to the present day, is one of many possible stories. A feud, at least, is verifiable.

Abyss has no biographer—', Emily Dickinson said. Truth is bottomless, and she herself almost invisible. After her death, letters from correspondents were burnt according to her instructions and soon legend replaced living fact.

A double life is not surprising: it's almost inevitable with intelligent women of Dickinson's homebound generation.

all words, scenes and claims of participants in the feud are documented in source notes. Though the feud began with adultery, Emily Dickinson became its focus after her death, each side battling for her unpublished papers. The issue was not so much money as the right to own the poet—the right to say who she was.

In her lifetime, Emily Dickinson had been called 'the myth'; when she died, Todd saw her disappear more deeply into her 'mystery'. Higginson introduced her to the public as a nunnish recluse who never thought of publication. He characterised her as 'whimsical', 'wayward', 'uneven' and 'exasperating'. Actually, the blueprint for this character goes back to the poet herself:

Emily Dickinson would repeatedly draw on volcanic eruptions as metaphors for poetic expression.

On the contrary, she and Harper gained the support of Alexander Lindey, an authority on copyright law for the Library of Congress. He argued that to publish these poems was in the public interest. He also considered it questionable for Mattie to pass on rights to a non-member of family. Hampson continued to threaten but had not the means or will to fight a legal battle.

What Emily rejects is not religion, but coercion. Signalling from behind her public failure is an intelligence collected enough to combat bullies who want to take over her mind and hardwire into it a formulaic 'tale'—the 'tale' of all fundamentalist faiths that close down the right to freedom of judgement.

Bolts of Melody, with more than six hundred unknown poems by Emily Dickinson, took the public by surprise in 1945.

This blend of truth and evasion was to characterise future legend. Todd did encounter words like blades but, as mouthpiece for the family, never mentions this, any more than Jane Austen's family saw fit to mention her sarcasms. Nineteenth-century families project an image of an authoress as retiring lady whose gift shades into an uneventful life. Nothing could be said of sickness, love, adultery or the rising fire of the feud.

Her edition, though, did make two errors, acceptable at that time: as her mother had done before her, she imposed titles on untitled poems and she standardised punctuation, not grasping how vital Dickinson's punctuation may be to the way we read her.

In the 1880s the focus of the feud had been adultery; in the 1890s the focus shifted to the divided treasure the poet had left behind. Who had the right to possess her? Who had the right to say what she was?

Mabel Todd would take possession of Dickinson's papers and market them on her own terms, so that the strange nature of the poet became obscured.

see the poet through a family upheaval that was to determine her image

She called it a 'still—Volcano—Life', and that volcano heaves, close to the surface, throughout her poetry and a thousand letters. Stillness, for her, was not a retreat from life but a form of control.