The Other Dickinson Sister: Lavinia’s Experimental Poetry

Abstract

The Other Dickinson Sister: Lavinia’s Experimental Poetry Stephanie Farrar In a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson following the publication of Emily Dickinson’s Poems in 1890, Austin Dickinson writes that his sister Lavinia was “expecting to become famous herself ” in relation to Emily’s poetry (10 Oct. 1890, 56). This may not surprise Dickinson readers who are already acquainted with Lavinia Dickinson’s role in promoting the publication of her sister’s poems. After first giving the manuscripts she found following Emily’s death to her sister-inlaw Susan Dickinson, she took them back and entrusted them to Mabel Loomis Todd when she felt Sue had tarried too long in producing a publication. Later, Lavinia continued to exert exacting control over Emily’s publications, even intervening with legalistic assertions of exclusive ownership of her sister’s work to prevent Sue from selling a few poems to the Independent magazine in 1891 (William Hayes Ward to William Austin Dickinson, 21 Mar. 1891). She also sought to influence Emily’s public image by energetically engaging with the early critical reception of her verse and occasionally writing back to reviewers to deny claims they made regarding Emily’s supposed “love disaster” (Lavinia Dickinson to Caroline Healey Dall, 29 Jan. 1895, 119) or “irreligiousness” (Thomas Niles to Mabel Loomis Todd, 17 Feb. 1891, 78). But Austin’s comment about Lavinia’s interest in fame is perhaps even more telling in relation to a much less well known dimension of Dickinson literary history: not only was Lavinia interested in shaping her sister’s poetic legacy; she also cultivated aspirations as a poet herself. In 1898, eight years after the first edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry was published by Roberts Brothers, and only a year before her own death, Lavinia Dickinson had a manuscript of seventeen of her own poems typeset. Long cataloged among the Dickinson Family Papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard, the manuscript is now accessible online, but only to those who know how to navigate the [End Page 26] vast collection. Although some Dickinson scholars have been aware of the poems’ existence, for reasons that are opaque to me, no one has found them particularly interesting before. I came across the poems serendipitously, as I combed through a series of boxes in the Reading Room of the Houghton looking for Dickinson family documents that shed light on the poet’s life. Unlike those who preceded me in opening the box containing Lavinia’s poems, I was astonished by the contents of the pages. Reading them, I felt something akin to Emily’s famous definition of poetry recorded by Thomas Wentworth Higginson in a letter to his wife after his first meeting with Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry” (16 Aug. 1870, 16). As I sought more information about the poems, I was surprised to learn that the principal scholar to deal with them, Richard Sewall, whose biographical work on Dickinson has been extraordinarily important, evidently thought they had little value. Sewall is at once responsible for the most broadly accessible information about the poems and, at the same time perhaps, for how they came to be ignored. He reprinted the text of the poems in the appendix to the first volume of his monumental work, The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974), but the presentation discourages attention to the work. The editorial choice to compress all the poems onto one and a half pages, with only asterisks and single line breaks marking page breaks, underscores Sewall’s dismissive attitude toward the poems. While he proposes that “Vinnie’s prose style, both written and oral deserves attention” (247; emphasis added), he treats her poetry as trivial at best, opining, “Although Vinnie as poet is hardly a topic of broad or deep dimensions, one document survives to show that, whatever posterity might think, she thought of herself as sometimes visited by the Muse” (250). Although he recorded the poems, seemingly for historical interest alone, Sewall’s presentation and description that each page contains “a poem (or fragment) typewritten” ultimately undermines meaningful discussion of the manuscript (250). Since Sewall...