My wars are laid away in books The life of Emily Dickinson

Review by Choice Review

In his ambitious biography, Habegger (formerly, Univ. of Kansas) builds on the numerous studies that have been published since Richard Sewall's two-volume The Life of Emily Dickinson (CH, Jun'75). The result is the most extensively researched, painstakingly documented, and comprehensive portrait of Dickinson ever to emerge. Although Dickinson remains a complex and enigmatic figure, Habegger's meticulous study enhances the reader's understanding of the multiple influences on the poet's art. Most notably, he challenges earlier studies that depicted Dickinson's life as a series of separate incidents and relationships, rather than examining it as an integrative whole. Habegger insightfully tackles persistent questions about Dickinson's sexuality, her reclusiveness, her political views, her feminism, and her health. He also disputes earlier characterizations of Dickinson's poetry as static, arguing instead that the poet's work underwent a "dramatic evolution" and that many of her poems "bear the impress of current experience." Also of note in this edition is the inclusion of an extensive gallery of portraits and photographs, including the recently discovered daguerreotype purported to be of Dickinson in her early thirties. Highly recommended for general readers and for academic libraries serving readers at all levels. D. D. Knight SUNY College at Cortland

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

By weaving together a chronologically integrated reading of Emily Dickinson's poetry and correspondence, Habegger has written the most complete and satisfying biography to date of a poet long shrouded in myth and illusion. Scholarly breakthroughs in dating the poems make it possible to limn a pattern of development in Dickinson's poetry previously invisible to critics, just as a newly discovered printer's copy of her letters lays bare personal disclosures excised by her family. For the first time, readers share fully in the private struggle through which Dickinson learned how to transform emotional trauma into art. Careful research traces much of this trauma--and subsequent poetry--to an unreciprocated and agonizingly persistent passion for a charismatic Presbyterian minister. Habegger employs the latest resources not only to open new vistas but also to challenge stubborn misconceptions (that the Civil War scarcely touched Dickinson's imagination, for example, or that Dickinson was a lesbian). Yet for all he has to teach, Habegger finally warns his readers against expecting complete understanding of a poet who hid her poetry from her own family and who defied future generations with riddles and paradoxes. A superb study, too luminous to remain the exclusive property of specialists. --Bryce Christensen

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Making perceptive use of feminist scholarship of the past three decades, the firsthand reports of Dickinson's intimates and careful readings of her lyrics and letters, former University of Kansas English professor Habegger creates a newly complex portrait of the poet's life (1830-86) and greatly enhances our understanding of her art. As in The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr., Habegger analyzes his subject's experiences from a modern perspective without obscuring the very different ways in which she herself perceived them. His greatest achievement is a nuanced depiction of how Dickinson transformed the limits placed on her into choices that enabled her poetry. Kept close to home in Amherst, Mass., by her authoritarian father, she chose to become a recluse and avoid altogether the social duties laid on middle-class women. Painfully rejected more than once as a young woman because of her extreme emotional neediness, she assumed a "childish" air that allowed her far more freedom of expression than that accorded New England's adults. "The blessing and the wound became one and the same," writes Habegger. "What that seems to mean for us is that her great genius is not to be distinguished from her madness." Habegger also gives full attention to the impact of the religious revival that swept New England in Dickinson's youth, reminding us of how tough young Emily had to resist intense pressure to declare herself "saved." Habegger rejects the traditional view that Dickinson's work and life were static; "her poetry shows a striking and dramatic evolution," he declares, and his immensely satisfying narrative makes the largely interior struggles she conducted over the course of 55 years just as dramatic. This is as good as literary biography gets. (On sale Oct. 2) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

It's hard to imagine how Richard Sewall's magnificent and elegantly written two-volume life of Dickinson (The Life of Emily Dickinson, LJ 11/1/74) can be surpassed. Wisely, Habegger (The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr.) concurs that Sewall's study remains the finest of the few biographies of the enigmatic New England poet. Even so, this new biography weaves newly available letters and other research notably the various drafts of the poetry gathered in R.W. Franklin's three-volume variorum edition of Dickinson's poems into a fascinating narrative of her life and development as a writer. Because of the uncertainty about the correct dates of her poems, many previous biographies, Sewall's included, viewed Dickinson as a poet who achieved the pinnacle of her creativity by the time she was 25. Using these newly available materials, Habegger ably traces Dickinson's evolution as a writer from her early childhood in the 1830s to her poetry of sex, isolation, and death in the 1860s and 1870s. He insightfully weaves Dickinson's poems into his narrative, showing clearly how her life and her poetry were bound together. In the end, however, Habegger reaches much the same conclusion as Sewall. No matter how much we reveal about her life and work, Dickinson will remain an enigma, just as she will remain, with Whitman, a seminal poet of the United States. Habegger's eloquent study deserves a place alongside Sewall's biography in all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/01.] Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Having assayed Henry James's father, Habegger takes on a tricky female: the elusive Emily. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A biography of the elusive Belle of Amherst (1830-86) that celebrates her imaginative witchery and triumph over adversity without penetrating her enigma. Because her sister fulfilled Emily Dickinson's request to burn her correspondence after her death, biographers experience considerable difficulty in sounding the deep currents of her life. To establish how she became so reclusive, Habegger (The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr., 1994) is at great pains to delve into her family-sometimes excessively so (the poet's birth does not occur until page 72). Her father, Edward Dickinson, a lawyer and one-term Whig congressman, was as zealous in guarding his children against all physical and financial danger as he was in claiming that women had no intellectual powers worth exercising. Her brother Austin, who lived with his wife next door to Edward and Emily, was too narrowly egotistical to appreciate Emily's writing and in later years embarked on an affair that affected posthumous publication of her work. Deaths involving close relatives and friends when she was young led Dickinson into existential doubt about God's justice, making her the lone family holdout from the local Congregational Church. Given these circumstances, Habegger plausibly suggests, Emily "perfected the art of living separately in close proximity," discovering boundless independence and creative freedom even as her outer world contracted. Using extensive research on her associations, he adroitly analyzes Dickinson's intense attachments: friendships with fellow schoolgirls, relationships with male intellectuals such as Atlantic Monthly editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and particularly her late-blooming romance with Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly jurist and friend of her father. Yet, despite his chronological organization, Habegger never helps the reader get a handle on the stages of Dickinson's development as poet and adult, and he sometimes dismisses claims of earlier Dickinson scholars without offering an equally adequate explanation for events. In the end, in an irony she would have appreciated, another biographer has mapped Dickinson's outer world without leaving adequate markers for her interior landscape.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 Amherst and the Fathers Sometime between 1636 and 1638, Emily Dickinson's earliest American progenitors in the paternal line, Nathaniel and Ann Gull Dickinson, left the parish of Billingborough in Lincolnshire, England, for the raw British outpost of Wethersfield, Connecticut. One motive for their drastic move was a determination to practice without interference the militant late-Reformation faith known as Puritanism. The times were hot with rebellion against the Church of England. In 1659 Nathaniel, Ann, and their children moved north into Massachusetts with a number of other families and established a town along the fertile Connecticut Valley deep in Norwottuck country. They called it Hadley, and Nathaniel played a leading role in organizing and regulating its municipal, educational, religious, and military affairs. When savage warfare broke out in 1675 between the indigenous peoples and the English, three of his nine sons were slain. When England's Puritan rule ended and those who had condemned Charles I to the headsman's block fled for their lives, they ended up in this frontier town, founded on righteousness and violence. And when a new town was carved out of Hadley's eastern parts a century later, in 1759, it was named for the man who would recommend using smallpox-infected blankets to "extirpate" the Indians: Lord Jeffrey Amherst. By 1830, the year Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, the area was thick with light-skinned farmers bearing her last name, and the ancestral zealotry had moderated into a quirky hardheaded stubbornness known locally as Dickinson grit. A Dickinson reunion held there in 1883 was attended by a huge number of Nathaniel's descendants, who listened to a minister declaim a versified panegyric composed by Elizabeth Dickinson Currier, one of Emily's aunts. The poem termed the clan's patriarchs "men of muscle, as of mind" and denounced any falling away from their evangelical zeal. What the ancestral legacy meant to the event's organizers is suggested by a photograph of the stage, which shows a slender gun standing on the floor next to portraits of Dickinson judges, generals, governors, and ministers. The weapon was said to have been "used in killing Indians and wolves." Although Emily Dickinson would not have attended this pious family gathering, she was very much a member of the tribe-savvy, tough, resolute, heaven-obsessed, independent, unusual. In one of her most eye-catching poems, "My life had stood a loaded gun," she, or at least the speaker, almost seems to be the deadly Dickinson musket come to life: None stir the second time - On whom I lay a Yellow Eye - Or an emphatic Thumb - Fr764 (about 1863) A later and less enigmatic poem concerns the unavoidability of "fighting" for one's life "In that Campaign inscrutable / Of the Interior" (Fr1230). Another, "My wars are laid away in books" (Fr1579), obviously retrospective, dates from about 1882, not long before the reunion. Hard battle resulting in victory or defeat was a central, lifelong metaphor for her. Far from being a wispy escapist, she was as martial a Dickinson as any of them. Yet she had no one's blood on her hands and paid little or no attention to family or local history, including her father's toast at Hadley's 1859 bicentennial invoking the by now moss-covered theme of New England's errand into the (so-called) wilderness. What complicated this inheritance for the poet was that she was not only disqualified by her sex from entering public life but actively instructed not to define herself in terms of the collective struggles of her time. Unlike her father, Edward, a conservative bulwark of the public world as she knew it, she was relegated to the private sphere, and that at a time when specifically domestic and affectionate qualities were assigned to women and given an extreme emphasis and development. Also, sentimental writing by both sexes was in vogue. If Emily's letters and poems often express a kind of ultimate in exquisite tenderness, we should bear in mind that the energies that might have been expended otherwise in different conditions were, with her, compressed into writing that had to remain a part of private life, even when confided to close friends. One of her poems from early in the Civil War sums up a woman's life and death by tracing her footprints into a deserted and unfamiliar place. Although the woman's path is untraveled by others, it is, paradoxically, already there, familiar, old: 'Twas the old - road - through pain - That unfrequented - One - These lines take us back to the old Puritan allegories of life's hard and lonely course, except that here the journey begins not in sin but in anguish. Observing the woman's tracks as if from just above, the speaker follows with breathless engagement: This - was the Town - she passed - There - where she - rested - last - Then - stepped more fast - The little tracks - close prest - Then - not so swift - Slow - slow - as feet did weary - grow - Then - stopped - no other track! The footprints hint at an extreme and convulsive effort, which appears to have failed. But the story isn't over: Wait! Look! Her little Book - The leaf - at love - turned back - Her very Hat - And this worn shoe just fits the track . . . Fr376 In the end, we are assured the traveler has been translated to a bed in "Chambers bright." That her place of rest is made up by women, not angels, hints that her impassioned but unknown errand into the wilderness was in some way specific to her sex. The only friends to whom Dickinson is known to have sent the poem were two first cousins on her mother's side, sisters, of whom she was especially fond. At the time she copied it in her secret manuscript books, about 1862, her own tracks were also extremely "close prest," resulting in 227 poems for that year alone, by R. W. Franklin's count. Her book, too, was dog-eared at love, and pain and solitude, and laughter and risk and freshness and power and so much more. Devious, disguised, and mostly obliterated, Dickinson's tracks are going to be harder to read than those of the risk-taking woman she wrote about. Is the poem about a single woman whose capacity for love drives her into panic, solitude, and death? At times it will look as if the poet was on that "unfrequented" road. But hers kept going where the other woman's stopped. In 1850, writing the future president of Dartmouth College, Charles Hammond described Amherst, the town Dickinson passed, as "the land of the fathers," the place where "the ancient altars" were still honored and tended. To follow her road to greatness, we have to go back to her paternal grandfather, whose dedication to those altars helped set the terms within which she defined and dared to exercise her high calling-an artist's heroic errand into and out of a wilderness all her own. All the Armor of Fortitude and Determination Samuel Fowler Dickinson, the poet's grandfather, embodied much of her paternal heritage, being both a man of means and a man of thought-a promoter of education, a community leader, a defender of Calvinist orthodoxy. He rose to greatness as a cofounder of Amherst College, but he also proved an obsessive, unbalanced, and scattered man whose judgment went astray and whose life ended in a shambles. After graduating from Dartmouth as Latin salutatorian in 1795, Samuel spent a year teaching school, an occupation he found too dependent on the "whims" of constituents. His lungs unwell, he underwent a conversion and began studying with the Reverend Nathanael Emmons, one of New England's most energetic and eminent Calvinists. Four months of Emmons convinced the young man he was not cut out for the ministry, but he continued to regard his instructor as a "great Divine." Indeed, judging from Samuel's intense lifelong drive, it looks as if he took to heart Emmons's curious "Exercise Scheme," a religious teaching that gave unusual emphasis to the power of the will and the obligation to use it.1 Returning to Amherst, Samuel put himself under the tutelage of Judge Simeon Strong, the town's leading lawyer and the owner of much valuable land in its center. In a letter to a college friend dating from this period, the young man wrote that "for entering the world we need all the armour of fortitude and determination." This statement, that of someone putting the Exercise Scheme into motion, catches the embattled drive working within Samuel and some of his descendants: all the armor and determination was precisely what they required. His imagery gives us our first sight of the resolute will to be great that his granddaughter would quietly assert some sixty years later. But Squire Dickinson, as he came to be known (the title being honorary only), was an overreacher, with little sense of his natural limits. Although he played a leading role in Amherst's affairs, he never acquired the calm and powerful reserve traditionally associated with a pillar of the community. Instead, as Elizabeth Currier recalled, he gave "himself but four hours of sleep, studying and reading till midnight, and rising at four o'clock he often walked to Pelham or some other town before breakfast. Going to court at Northampton, he would catch up his green bag and walk the whole seven miles. 'I cannot wait to ride.' " Ambitious and public-spirited, he was also frenetic, the kind of man who undoes his own success. He acquired title to a great deal of land in and about Amherst, as had Judge Strong, but he couldn't carry the mortgages. In state elections, he was sent to the house ten times and once to the senate, but when he ran for a congressional seat in 1828 after opposing his district on the tariff issue, he was crushed 1,968 to 246, his hometown turning against him two to one. Three years later, addressing the regional Agricultural Society, he unloaded a vast collection of opinions on education, militia reform, Sabbath schools, ardent spirits, excessive government expenditures, and all aspects of farming. "He works very hard," a daughter reported in his old age; "he thinks he cannot get along without lending a helping hand to every man's plough." The woman Samuel married on March 21, 1802, Lucretia Gunn of nearby Montague, was said by one of her daughters to be slow "to form acquaintances or attachments," which may mean either that she was withdrawn or that she was unfriendly. Her few extant letters, mainly to her son Edward (the poet's father), bespeak an ordinary and down-to-earth range of interests and a strikingly ungenteel directness: "We are engaged killing hogs to day of course must shorten my letter." "Do not recollect any remarkable occurrence except Mrs. Hicks who once attempted to cut her throat last week jumped into the well and put an end to her existence." In 1820 news of a revival inspired the hope her son would be converted "and not have to lament the 'Harvest is past the Summer is ended & you are not saved.' " Curiously, 1820 seems to have been the year she herself joined Amherst's First Congregational Church-twenty years after her husband. According to Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet's grandmother "was by tradition of somewhat tart disposition, and was often referred to in moments of bad temper as 'coming out' in her high-strung grandchildren. If a door was banged-'It's not me-it's my Grandmother Gunn!' was an excuse glibly offered by the three small rascals." Toward his children, Samuel was anything but a cold, uncaring patriarch. When a son became feverish, the Squire let everything go and "devoted my time, night & day, to him," writing this very letter "by his bedside." After another son contracted the same illness, the anxious father was "able to attend to little other business" despite his desperate need of money. Concerned about his daughters' education, he was so eager to have them attend a course of lectures by the botanist Amos Eaton that he urged Edward to come home at Yale's term break and escort his sisters. He added, uncoercively, "I do not mean to direct, but to express my desire, that you should do this." By 1813 Samuel had fathered five of his nine children and it was time to enlarge his family's living space and mark his own civic prominence. Replacing the home previously standing on the site, he erected a spacious and imposing house that looked down on Main Street from a slight elevation. Amherst's first brick house, the Dickinson Homestead2 was a symmetrical, hip-roofed structure in the Federal style, with four large rooms on each of its two stories. Although this was the building in which the poet was born and spent her first nine and last thirty years, it had yet to undergo the extensive additions and remodeling she would take for granted as an adult. The modifications seem to have begun quite early. A one-story wooden "office" (no longer standing) was attached to the west wall, and in 1821 a daughter noted that "Papa has had ten men to work for him all the week they are to work upon his house." A year and a half later she triumphantly announced to brother Edward, "we have got some curtains to the west front-chamber, we expect to have our blinds up in two, or three, weeks, and when you come home you wont hardly know our house." The change from "his" to "our" speaks volumes. The Dickinsons' life at home was originally much more improvised than the stately mansion of the present suggests. In 1817, well before the Squire's contributions to Amherst College began consuming his estate, he mortgaged this house for $2,500 (today roughly $75,000), an encumbrance he was never able to lift. The household that shaped the poet's father was marked by high dreams and ambitions, a generosity as reckless as it was shining, worsening indebtedness, and a series of desperate expedients concluding in disaster. Having known what it was like to live without the security and dignity that should have gone with his rank, Edward Dickinson would prove extremely protective of his own family, particularly his wife and older daughter. Excerpted from My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Alfred Habegger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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