The Riddle of Emily Dickinson
Rebecca Patterson
It announces what is perhaps the most significant literary-biographical discovery since that made of Wordsworth’s illegitimate daughter. The ‘riddle’ of Emily Dickinson’s life is widely known. Here was an abnormally shy New England virgin who spent the greater part of her adult life as a recluse; she never, or almost never, ventured beyond the bounds of her beloved garden, and she entertained old friends by seating them in the parlor while she talked with them from an adjoining room. After her death were published her poems: poems which burned like small pellets of dry ice with an intensity of emotion and imagination, a precision of observation, and a packed splendor of language that marked her as the greatest woman poet since Sappho.
A considerable portion of that poetry testified to a heart-searing and unquestionably authentic experience of love, rejection, and renunciation in her life. To whom was this ‘love’ poetry addressed? Why did Emily seclude herself from the world in her garden and her upstairs room? These questions her Amherst neighbors began to ask upon the publication of her poetry, and her biographers have been trying to answer them ever since. Various men, unmarried and married, have been proposed for the role of Emily’s ‘lover,’ but none of these proposals has ever been really convincing. Now Rebecca Patterson, on the basis of a brilliant hunch and diligent investigation, has provided a convincing and revealing answer. The person who inspired the love poetry of Emily Dickinson was a woman.
She was born Kate Scott; she became later successively Kate Turner and Kate Anthon. The evidence for this announcement is too complex to be summed up in a short review. It consists of poems, letters, diaries, interviews, suppressions, emendations, marginal markings, and deduction. Its orderly exposition is the main business of Mrs. Patterson’s volume. It is convincing both by its extent and by how much it explains. With the supplying of this missing piece, other pieces of the puzzle for the first time fit together to form a picture. The key is furnished not only to an identity in Emily Dickinson’s life, but to an understanding of her withdrawal, to the meaning of many of her poems and much in her letters, and to the whole baffling history of her publication.
To obtain this key Mrs. Patterson has had to investigate not only the life and character of Emily Dickinson, but the personalities, characters, and motives of Emily’s sister, Lavinia; her sister-in-law, Sue; Sue’s daughter, Madame Bianchi; Emily’s editor, Mabel Loomis Todd; and, above all, Sue’s and Emily’s friend, Kate Scott Anthon, the eager, responsive, warm-hearted woman who was able to engage and capture the deepest emotional attachment of genius. To obtain this key Mrs. Patterson had not only to uncover new facts but to unweave old facts from a tangled skein of intentional mystification and falsification. For apparently those persons familiar with Emily’s emotional involvement deliberately set out, by suppressing poems and letters or parts of letters, by changing dates, and by inventing false clues, to conceal the true nature of that attachment from the public.
In this program Emily herself played some part, changing pronouns in her poems from feminine to masculine. Reading this book, one often feels as he does when reading Emily’s poems as if he were riding on a powder keg. One learns again that fact is stranger than fiction more complicated, more tangled, and more exciting The burning jealousies and antagonisms in the Dickinson family relationships as well as the ardent attachments and enthusiasms are like the stuff of Greek tragedy whether interpreted by Aeschylus or O’Neill. And realizing the tremendous maelstrom of pressures operating on Emily, from within and without, one recognizes again that genius is no easy or comfortable possession.
The pressures which produced her achievement at the same time make it more marvelous. Abnormal Emily’s life certainly was; all the more remarkable, then, the often piercing sanity of her poems those sudden sparks discharging between the poles of a powerful mind and an injured heart. Rebecca Patterson deserves great credit for her taste and good sense in the presentation of her material. Her subject is a touchy one, wide open to false emphasis and misconstruction. She handles it delicately yet candidly; above all, she handles it humanly. One never gets the impression in reading this book that he is dealing with a case history, but always with a warm, vital human being.
One can emerge from it with a larger understanding of more than the life of Emily Dickinson. Not all of Emily Dickinson’s life is in this book. It is not and does not purport to be a biography. It investigates only Emily Dickinson’s ‘riddle’ the facts behind her love poetry and her withdrawal from the world. For her full story one must read this in conjunction with a full-scale biography such as George F. Whicher’s excellent This Was a Poet . Nor is all of Emily Dickinson’s personality in this book. If the atmosphere seems sometimes too continuously charged, let the reader turn to the clear untroubled whimsical nature poems and the terse philosophical speculations of her collected verse for indication of the full range of Emily’s mind and nature.
This is not a criticism of Mrs. Patterson’s book, only a definition of her aims. Not all of Mrs. Patterson’s book and this is a criticism is as exciting or significant as its first half. The second part, devoted almost entirely to the later life and European travels of Kate Anthon, flags in interest even to the point of dulness (sic). Kate Anthon was not a genius. Delightful, generous, and engaging as she must have been in life, she had not the gift, like Emily, to stamp the imprint of her nature on eternity. Her story becomes interesting only as it explains and interprets the story of Emily Dickinson. Mrs. Patterson, at present a resident of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is a native of Arkansas, went to high school in Amarillo, and received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Texas. Her book is a major contribution by a person from the Southwest area. ~ Laurence Perrine, Southwest Review, Vol. 37, No. 1 (WINTER 1952), pp. 81-83
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Details
| Genre | Autobiography/Biography; Grier Rated |
| Publication Date | 1951 |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
| Format | Hardcover |
| No. of Pages | 434 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | Great |
| BookID | 10725 |
