The Dickinsons of Amherst

Emily Dickinson's reclusive, sparsely documented life was nourished (or poisoned) in the bosom of her family. This generously collaborative volume chronicles that life in suggestive words and pictures, including the odd history of the posthumous discovery and publication of Dickinson's poetry, involving scandalous family quarrels that lasted several generations. Polly Longsworth tells how Emily's father, a congressman and a pillar of the Amherst community, nonetheless misappropriated the money of those under his protection. Emily's brother, Austin, married the poet's best friend, Susan Gilbert, and kept a cultured household that welcomed such visiting luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Law Olmsted. Austin and Susan lived with their children next door to Emily and her sister, Lavinia, both spinsters. Mabel Loomis Todd, the lively wife of an Amherst astronomer, became Austin's lover, with the knowledge if not the tolerance of all parties. Barton St. Armand tells how after the poet's death, in 1886, her poems began their vexed journey into the world: Mabel Todd, taking over from Lavinia, edited the early volumes, but for two generations the Dickinson descendants snubbed the Todd descendants on the street and quarreled with them in the Amherst law courts. Christopher Benfey takes up the story when, in 1990, Austin's house fell vacant and the noted photographer Jerome Liebling opened the lenses of his cameras onto a ghostly domestic scenery, including the sealed room of little Gib Dickinson, who died at the age of eight, in 1883. His aunt Emily, in her white dress, left her own home for the last time to sit by his bed. When she died, she left a drawer crammed with hundreds of poems that engage the shimmer between the living and the dead — this book does. Unreachable through either words or pictures alone, the effect of this multidimensional book is to break your heart

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