(WW Norton, 2018)

After Emily

The Untold Tale of the Women Who Introduced Emily Dickinson to the World

By the fall of 1883, it was the dirty little secret that everyone in the small college town of Amherst, Massachusetts seemed to know. Beautiful, young and ambitious Mabel Loomis Todd was in love with Austin Dickinson, scion of a venerable old New England family. Mabel once wrote in her journal of their relationship, “I have read a great many stories, and I have had a good many love letters, and I have heard a good many lovers talk, but I never heard or read or imagined such a wonderful…or so divine a love as he has for me.  No souls were ever so united, no love story approaches it.”

But Mabel and Austin were married – to other people.  Austin, who was almost three decades older than Mabel, was also the brother of the reclusive and brilliant Emily Dickinson. Mabel came to know Emily through her relationship with Austin. And she came to know Emily’s unique poetry. After Emily died it was Mabel who first brought Emily’s poetry to print, Mabel who conceived an original plan to market the unusual verse and Mabel who launched the image of the secluded poet garbed in white we still know today.

Emily Dickinson (Amherst College Archives and Special Collections)

Austin Dickinson. (Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

What we don’t know is the story of the ways in which Mabel’s controversial work editing and promoting Emily’s poetry figured into a complicated web of relationships between members of the Dickinson family and the Todds that lasted for generations.

After Emily is a mother/daughter biography of Mabel and her only child, Millicent Todd Bingham. This book tells the story of Mabel’s thirteen year-long love affair with Austin and how this relationship led her to the Emily Dickinson work that defined her career and her life.  It was published by W.W. Norton & Company in October, 2018; the paperback version of the book came out on December 10, 2019 – Emily Dickinson’s birthday!

Their relationship also complicated Mabel’s already complex relationship with Millicent, especially when, years after Austin had died, Mabel turned to Millicent and asked her for help in bringing out a new edition of Emily’s poetry and letters to mark the centenary of her birth. The multifaceted passions in both Mabel and Millicent’s lives ultimately resulted in controversies over the editing and ownership of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, in her papers being split up, and in battles over the right to define the so-called “Belle of Amherst.” This is a story that has never before been fully told.

Mabel Loomis Todd.
 (Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

Discovering Mabel and Millicent

I’ve always been an avid biography reader.  And it was in reading biographies of Emily Dickinson that I first encountered Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932). The more I read about her, the more fascinating she seemed.  To the extent she’s remembered today it is either as Emily’s editor or Austin’s lover. But Mabel was so much more.  She led a full and rich life as a published writer, a gifted artist and musician, a world traveler  and a rare 19th century female intellectual who gave much-heralded talks across the country on an astonishing variety of topics.

And then I found out that she had an equally remarkable daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham (1880-1968).  Trained as a scientist but extremely proficient in music and a talented writer, Millicent had so many potential career directions that she floundered in finding her life’s work. She also had a difficult time finding any satisfaction in her love life in the series of romantic relationships she had with both women and men.  Both Mabel and Millicent pushed the boundaries of what women of their eras did, in their personal lives and in their professional ones.

I discovered that neither woman ever threw out a single scrap of paper in her life; there were more than 700 boxes of previously unmined and unpublished papers that both Mabel and Millicent left behind sitting in the basement of Yale University’s Sterling Library. Both women were epic chroniclers of their own lives, keeping both diaries and journals – Mabel for 66 years, Millicent for 80. And then there were the dozens of scrapbooks, the hundreds of letters, the thousands of photographs.  There were enormous treasure troves of materials about their fascinating lives that had rarely – if ever – been looked at.

Millicent spent the last three decades of her long life in a frantic quest to figure out what to do with the tens of thousands of papers and photos that had documented her own and her parents’ lives. In notes for an autobiography she never quite got around to writing, she lamented that she was running out of time and wondered, “Who will tell my story?” When I read that, I knew the answer.   I became determined to tell their stories, and to show how these two extraordinary women, with their own very complicated mother/daughter relationship, were the people who first presented Emily Dickinson to the world.

On June 1st, 2017 the tour group from the Amherst History Museum concluded its “MLT Tour of Amherst” at Wildwood Cemetery with a champagne toast to Mabel

Window display in NYC for a talk for the Victorian Society NY and the General Assembly of Mechanics and Tradesmen, April 2019

Here are some additional articles I have published about Mabel and Millicent:

The Light As She Saw It: On Sitting in Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom

https://lithub.com/the-light-as-she-saw-it-on-sitting-in-emily-dickinsons-bedroom/

Millicent Todd Bingham:  Life of an Unlikely Dickinson Scholar

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2018/10/millicent-todd-bingham

How Much Editing Was Done to Emily Dickinson’s Poems After She Died?

https://lithub.com/how-much-editing-was-done-to-emily-dickinsons-poems-after-she-died/

Early 20th Century “Tree Huggers”: a presentation about Mabel Loomis Todd, Millicent Todd Bingham, and the development of their conservation impulses – delivered at the 80th anniversary of the Hog Island Camp.

Marta Werner, Professor of English, D’Youville College, author of Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios and Emily Dickinson:  The Gorgeous Nothings

To write this remarkable biography, Dobrow has turned the Todd-Bingham archives at Yale’s Sterling Library inside out. By doing so, she has succeeded in illuminating more fully than ever before the intricate net of desires, both conscious and unconscious, that led Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham to undertake the editing of Emily Dickinson’s writings that secured their place in literary history while irreversibly altering the trajectory of their own lives. The force of Dobrow’s portrait of Todd, the better known and more mythologized (sometimes demonized) of her two subjects, lies in its embrace of the conflicting aspects of Todd without denying any of them; the power of her depiction of Bingham issues from the probing analysis of Bingham’s profoundly conflicted feelings about her brilliant, transgressing parents and the impact of those sentiments on her connection to Dickinson. Dobrow’s research greatly enlarges our sense of both women’s humanness; in her rendering of Millicent Todd Bingham, last in a long line of Wilder women, biography fuses with American tragedy. After Emily is also a book for and of our time: a meditation on the nature of agency and the role of affect in women’s lives and writing; a story of the archives we create during, and sometimes even in lieu of, our lives; of the archives that represent us after our deaths; and of the abyss at the heart of all archives. Looking back from the far horizon of Dobrow’s meticulously researched and absorbing biography, we should not be surprised that while Todd and Bingham come ever more sharply into focus, Dickinson herself flickers in and out of the light, at last receding to an unfathomable distance.

Reviews:

Marianne Curling, Curator, Amherst Historical Society 

With this book, Julie Dobrow adroitly recounts the complex scope of how the Dickinson and Todd families intersected in Amherst, Massachusetts and beyond to present Emily Dickinson, poet. From 1888 to 1968, the Todd women worked to give Emily her due, often in opposition to the Dickinson women. Mabel Loomis Todd’s role has been recounted before but less known is how her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, shaped and completed the legacy of Emily Dickinson. Today, 50 years later, the entire nuanced and complicated story of these two women and Emily Dickinson is ours at last in this diligently sourced and compellingly written history. 

Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Hiddensee

Julie Dobrow has written an honest, sometimes searing portrait of the two idiosyncratic women, mother and daughter, who between them delivered Emily Dickinson’s “letter to the World”— rescuing this genius hermit from obscurity by deciphering and publishing her sheafs of high voltage poetry. Inevitably, AFTER EMILY is also a portrait of the social mores and literary convictions of an America hurtling toward modernity. Riveting, unblinkered, sad, and brave, AFTER EMILY makes the case for these two posthumous amanuenses as urgent agents of critical work we came so near to losing.

Polly Longsworth, author of Austin and Mabel:  The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd

Julie Dobrow has grabbed a tiger by the tail in her skillful reanalysis of Mabel Loomis Todd’s role in recognizing, preserving, publishing and promoting Emily Dickinson’s powerful poetry. Yet Mabel’s story is only the half of it. Emotional turmoil, resulting from her years-long, half-secret, love affair with the poet’s brother Austin, subsequently led each of the lovers’ daughters to battle furiously and for decades over the publication rights to the poet’s remaining trove. This study focuses on the complex, extensively documented, relationship between Mabel and her conflicted daughter Millicent, who was impervious to her mother’s charms, but not to duty, truth, regret, and the vital importance to the world of Dickinson’s poetry. Dobrow weaves the vitality of the personal into her scholarship, surprising and enlightening readers about one of America’s greatest literary rescues.

Neal Shapiro, President & CEO, WNET/Channel 13 NY

“Julie Dobrow has crafted a meticulously researched work  that is both an insightful literary appreciation and a compelling period drama.”

Long list copy from the Plutarch Award, Biographer’s International, January 14, 2019:

THE LEGACY OF AMERICA’S GREATEST POET by Julie Dobrow, (W. W. Norton) A public scandal, a bitter lawsuit, and a decades-long dispute over the tiny hand-sewn books of poetry discovered in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom at the time of her death propel Julie Dobrow’s narrative of an ambitious mother-daughter pair whose work shaped American literary history. Dobrow’s impressive scholarship, crystal-clear prose, and insistence on the value of lives on the edge of history’s spotlight make this a uniquely memorable and instructive biography.

Library Journal: Starred Review (7/26/18)

“The biographical material related to Emily Dickinson’s legacy is the work’s driving force, but Dobrow’s skillful account of Mabel’s and Millicent’s lives makes this page-turner a must-read for the poet’s most ardent fans.”

Publisher’s Weekly (May 28, 2018)

https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780393249262