The Mistress and the Manuscripts

A Poetry Tale about Emily Dickinson, told by Hello Doggo.

Here’s how Mabel Loomis Todd met Emily Dickinson. She didn’t.

September eighteen eighty-two. Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother, invites Mabel — an astronomer’s dazzling young wife — to sing and play the piano at the family home. Emily listens from the shadows of the hall. She never appears. But afterwards, she sends in a glass of sherry. And a poem.

The next evening, so the story goes, Austin and Mabel confess their love. Austin wrote one word in his diary: Rubicon.

Their affair ran for nearly thirteen years — with Austin’s wife, Susan, Emily’s dearest friend, living next door. And some of their meetings, it’s said, took place behind closed doors in the Dickinson house itself.

In eighteen eighty-six, Emily died, leaving nearly eighteen hundred poems, almost none of them published. And who did the painstaking work of deciphering them? Mabel. With Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she brought out the first collection in eighteen ninety. It was a sensation.

Then came the feud. After Austin died, the family went to court over a strip of meadow, fifty-three feet wide, that he’d wanted Mabel to have. Emily’s sister, Lavinia, sued, and won. Mabel’s answer was to lock her share of the manuscripts in a camphorwood chest — and there they stayed for decades.

Now, the sherry, the poem, the trysts — a good deal of that comes from Mabel’s own diaries, so you’re getting her side of things.

Which rather suits the poem. Tell all the truth but tell it slant. In the Dickinson family, nobody ever told it any other way.