Lyndall Gordon, prize-winning author of six biograpies including T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life; Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life; and Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, is senior research fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is interviewed by Jenny McPhee, novelist and translator, author most recently of A Man of No Moon, feminism columinst for the on-line book review Bookslut, and co-host of the Upper Wimpole Street Literary Salon for Women Writers in London.


5 Questions for Lyndall Gordon:

1. Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds, a brilliant book about Emily Dickinson but also about what it was like to be a woman and a writer in 19th century New England, was a revelation for me on all sorts of levels, including Dickinson’s publication history. She was, it turns out, not adverse to publishing her work, so why wasn’t she published in her lifetime?

Ten of her 1,789 poems were, in fact, published, but only one of them with her assent. No existing typography fits her varied dashes. Her taste for continued improvisation may have determined a resistance to print culture involving as it does editorial intervention and conventional typography. For these and other reasons, she preferred the older practice of circulating manuscripts.
Her alertness to the limitations of language put her ahead of her time, irritating editors who mistook innovation for ignorance. Dickinson’s chosen mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Boston man of letters, criticised her poetic line (broken by dashes) as “spasmodic.” What he saw as jolts interrupting the melodic flow of nineteenth-century verse, we now might see as jazzy syncopation. I think she’s close to the Modernism of Eliot, injecting silences into a language that edges what Eliot defines as the “frontiers of consciousness where words fail, though meanings still exist.”

2. I was astonished to learn about Emily’s brother, Austin Dickinson’s, rather steamy affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, a fascinating character herself. Was this also a new discovery?

Biography, of course, is not only about new facts; it must reconstitute old facts in the light of the new. One fact in print since 1984 but lost to sight is that the adultery of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd started off in the home of the Dickinson sisters. The lovers would meet behind the closed door of the library or dining-room (used as a sitting-room in winter) for two or so hours about three times a week. The layout of the Dickinson Homestead shows that these assignations would have blocked the poet’s pursuits: her second writing table in the dining-room and the entrance to her conservatory via the library.
As for the documentation of Austin and Mabel’s affair, there are corroborating details in the lovers' diaries, Mabel’s voluminous journals and her sexually explicit fragments of autobiography. It’s abundantly clear that Mabel enjoys sex and, unlike other women of her time, has no fears of conception. She welcomes a heightened experience: on occasion, voyeurism and, briefly, same-sex love. She’s extraordinarily candid in a graceful style - nothing in her eloquence is salacious - and her love-making is always accompanied by tenderness and commitment.

3. Your book deals with several instances of slander, and how it contributed to many misconceptions about Emily herself as well as several of her family members. Would you comment on the power of slander to skew biography?

Following a private slander--the adulterers’ misnomer of Austin Dickinson’s wife, Susan Dickinson (in mourning), as “the great Black Moghul”--her husband’s mistress put it about that Susan was fickle in her relationships (a cover for an end to Susan’s friendship with Mabel); that Susan was lazy (a cover for Mabel’s secret take-over of the honor of editing Emily Dickinson); and that Susan was so “cruel” that the poet had to shut herself away. Mabel (with Austin’s collusion) was determined to wipe from record the fact of Susan’s centrality in Dickinson’s life – to the extent of tampering with Emily Dickinson’s letters and rubbing out “Sue” at the foot of an adoring poem. As well as biography, the Todd bias has scewed recent fictions and a major history of intimacy (which draws on Mabel’s sexual candour).
The standard and most influential biography, by Richard Sewall, was published in 1974, thirty-six years ago. Millicent Todd Bingham, as leader of the Todd camp in the mid-twentieth century, appointed Sewall as her literary executor and gave him exclusive access to the Todd Papers. Tapes of her interviews with Sewall in the late fifties and early sixties, as well as Millicent’s increasingly biased reminiscences, reveal the partisan intentions behind this biography. A bias towards one or other camp has, in fact, infiltrated almost all biographies as well as two recent novels. It is indeed tricky to find the path through a thicket of alluring misinformation put out by contesting camps from the 1880s to the present. Though Alfred Habegger succeeded admirably in correcting many facts, the scope of his 2001 biography did not extend to the after-effects of the feud.
“Abyss has no biographer -,” Emily Dickinson said. Truth is bottomless, and she herself almost invisible. “I’m Nobody!” she declares. In shadow she may be, but no nonentity, and the roles in her repertoire are many: the tease speaking in riddles to those who would know her; the flirt who exults in the role of “Wife – without the Sign!”; and above all the not-so-veiled boasts of volcanic power. This presents a deeper challenge than the obfuscations of slander.

4. Another revelation for me was your suggestion that Emily Dickinson could have suffered from epilepsy. How does this effect “the myth” surrounding the poet’s reclusive life?

Townsfolk in Amherst, Massachusetts called her “the myth” because she shut herself away in the Dickinson Homestead. After her death, a legend of an eccentric, old-fashioned spinster grew up around her. It was Emily herself who devised the blueprint, starting at the age of twenty-three when she declined an invitation from a friend: “I’m so old-fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.”
The mystery of her withdrawal from the world is underpinned by what are known as the “Master” letters: three letters to a supposed lover. There have been seven candidates for the married “Master,” and the story has been a centre-piece of Dickinson biography, but “Master” is more likely to have been in part a compositional fantasy. Here Dickinson plays at control and loss of control with dangerous men like Jane Eyre’s “Master,” the violent Heathcliff, the assaults of frontier narrative (“I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side”) and a ruler she calls “Plantagenet.”
Instead, an insistent secret in Dickinson’s poems nudges her reader with the question: to “tell” or not to “tell”? This word reverberates throughout her writing, and from time to time the lava of her hidden life does jolt out through the crater of her “buckled lips.” She cultivates the mystery of “it”: a transforming event, she explains, “that struck – my ticking – through -”.
Different strands of possible evidence, including medications that tally with those in use for epilepsy, suggests a sickness that was unmentionable. Given its unpredictable manifestations, seclusion was the only way to preserve the secret. There’s a genetic element to epilepsy, and two others in the Dickinson family (one next door and the other across the road) were afflicted. Emily’s first surviving letter, at the age of eleven, remarks on Cousin Zebina who bit his tongue in the course of “a fit.”
“My loss, by sickness – Was it Loss?” she asks. Or was it “Etherial Gain”? This is both a subject for poetry and opens up a space for a lifetime of writing.

5. I see you have dedicated your book to the late Diane Middlebrook, scholar, biographer, and stunning human being who was also co-founder of the original London Women's Literary Salon. Her genuine enthusiasm and encouragement of women's writing touched a great many of us. Women's encouragement was crucial to Emily Dickinson's poetry--her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and Helen Hunt, for example. Would you tell us how women have encouraged you in the writing of Lives Like Loaded Guns?

You put it perfectly about Diane's enthusiasm and encouragement. One of the most heartening aspects of the London Salon was the encouraging way Diane would ask each of us to say what we were writing. I used to feel a lift from the warmth of her assent, and I think that she too must have felt that communal assent when she was writing "Her Husband", looking anew at the shared creativity of the Hughes-Plath marriage. At the time, in the first phase of the women's salon when we used to meet at Kamy Wicoff's London flat, Diane gave a talk on the problem of rights: her own struggles with the Hughes estate and its lawyers, who would scrutinize every paraphrase of unpublished material, and compel her to reword it if too close to the original. The problem of rights loomed for me too, for Harvard University Press was known for charging a lot for quotations from Dickinson's poetry. I was grateful to my Virago editor, Lennie Goodings, for urging me to include "more poetry," and then grateful to the Dickinson scholar and editor, Martha Nell Smith, for her experienced advice on how to approach Harvard. A different and seemingly intractable problem was to locate a vital deposition by the servant to the Dickinson sisters, Maggie Maher, in a court case of 1898 that was central to the feud story. This deposition seemed to have disappeared. When I mentioned this to Karen Kukil (editor of Sylvia Plath's Journals and curator of the Woolf and Plath papers at Smith) Karen was determined that this document should not be lost - and she did track it down to the legal archives in Worcester, Massachusetts. Eighty pages were faxed across the Atlantic one exciting afternoon, just in time for writing the court-case chapter. All this while, Diane's friendship was upholding: living near to Paddington Station, she thought nothing of jumping on a train to Oxford. I'd meet her on the platform and drive her home for a lunch of salmon and salad, and the hours would fly by as we shared our aims as biographers. We discussed the ways biography might one day become a form of art if biographers had the courage and determination to develop more narrative momentum and venture beyond the pedigree-to-grave formula. There was also joy in talking freely, as one could with Diane because one could trust the loyalty of her friendship. That freedom liberated me to say in writing what I really thought about Dickinson's volcanic character. I miss Diane more than I can say, both as biographer and friend, and believe she would be glad that members of her London salon, Elaine Showalter, Miranda Seymour, Carole Angier, Maggie Gee and others are now reviving it.