Alfred Habegger

This is the best Dickinson biography I've read, though Sewall's is very thorough, and the best from 1974-2001 or so. Habegger includes the newly discovered daguerreotype acquired by Gura, of Dickinson not age 16 (the universally familiar portrait, in Amherst College collection).
Besides the photos, his narrative is fine, even moving: Habegger's account of Dickinson's response to being chided by Helen Hunt Jackson for not publishing, and his account of Dickinson's funeral in the house. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," like many of ED's later poems, was written on found paper--as was the Gettysburg address--; for instance, a graduation program from Massachusetts College of Agriculture, which her father also helped found.
The brilliant, courageous Col. Higginson, who led the first federally organized black regiment in the Civil War, perhaps found his courage failing in his famous encounter with the poet in 1870, "I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much...I am glad not to live near her"(524).
He may have felt in almost a medieval joust, which despite his military training and bravery, he had not won. Perhaps gendre dynamics have always suffered from brilliant women--like Jane Austen, whose wit is ignored by her pious brothers' epitaph in Winchester Cathedral--though it is only fair to add, powerful women, as with men, need not be brilliant.
The poet confessed to her supporter and reviser, "I never knew how to tell time by the clock till I was 15. My father thought he had taught me but I did not understand & I was afraid to say I did not & afraid to ask anyone else lest he should know." Patriarchal power explain ED's, "I do not cross my Father's land to any House or town"(521) when inviting Higginson from Newport where he lived to Amherst. The Col sized up the men well, "Her father was not severe I should think but remote." (One might perhaps say the same of Austen's brothers.)
Father's investments fostered both Amherst colleges: one was the private, toll-charging Sunderland Bridge. (I think of a one-lane toll bridge I crossed in England, to an historic house and golf course; it was perhaps 30 mi from Wethersfield Air Base, as I recall, but my photos are on a decommissioned computer.)… (mais)

The short review: If you're going to read a biography of Dickinson, this one is probably your best bet.

The dirty details: I sought this out when I was about 250 pages into Cynthia Griffin Wolff's biography of Dickinson. Hers is a beautiful book, and I intend to finish it; but although it gives valuable context to Dickinson's life, I felt a certain lack in the nuts-and-bolts department. I wanted more basic facts.

This book has them, in abundance. Dickinson herself remains elusive, of course. We may not be able to know how she felt about the terrifying stories in the Sabbath School Visiter [sic], but I was thrilled to know this children's magazine existed and had been read by the poet in her childhood. (Her uncle was the editor and gave Emily and her younger sister Lavinia a subscription.) I was able to find copies online and read some of the actual text for myself, but Habegger offers some extremely representative summaries:

March brought "An Infant Missionary's Dying Gift," which told of Frederick Dewey and how he fell into a barrel of boiling water at the age of three and then gave the missionaries all he had, sixty cents, before expiring.

In August the future poet probably read an excruciating true-life narrative, "The Lost Finger," in which twelve-year-old Elizabeth sticks an index finger into a hole in a "revolving card" at a factory and has the flesh torn away up to the first joint, leaving "about an inch of the clean, white, naked bone." "O!" adds the narrator, "the nerves of that very finger of my own, twitch and tremble as I write it."

I know people worry these days about the violence children are exposed to in video games and the news, and I think they're right to be concerned. I just think it's interesting to keep in mind what used to pass for appropriate recreational reading for kids back in the allegedly good old days.

Anyway. Habegger offers up plenty of documentation -- stories such as these, lists of books and authors Dickinson read and admired (if you have a picture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning hanging in your room, it's safe to say you're a fan), and lots of letters and news articles and, of course, poetry.

This book is probably the best guide to learning as much about Dickinson as it's possible to know from the outside. The reader is still left looking wistfully at the firmly closed door of Emily Dickinson's elusive mind and heart and genius. But no biographer can unlock that chamber, and Habegger is wise enough not to try.

The maximum nerditude postscript: Although I found this book incredibly helpful in my research, I still don't know why Habegger dislikes Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily's niece, so much. I'm about to start reading Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds, in the hope of learning more about the copyright battles that went on after Dickinson's death. Dickinson's niece was certainly involved in those, but so was Dickinson's brother's mistress, as well as that mistress's daughter. Dickinson may have led a quiet life, but her family certainly got up to some interesting shenanigans. Watch this space for more dirt on that subject.… (mais)

Gee, what to say? I'm not qualified to assess this book in terms of its value to scholars, only in the pleasure it may afford to readers. It has been decades since I have read the Richard Sewall biography, but my memory of that work was that it was less dry and more fun to read than this one. It is a very careful book that seldom strays from verifable information and therefore does not present a grand thesis that might catch one's attention. That makes it more trustworthy but less readable than those biographies that essentially create their own Emily. I think it's well nigh impossible to write good biography of Dickinson - the information just isn't there. Habegger fills in the knowledge gaps with very detailed information about Dickinson's family members, but if you believe that geniuses are born, not made, information about family life, schooling and town politics are of limited value in getting to the heart of the subject.

For those who keep score, Habegger is a proponent of the Wadsworth-as-Master theory.… (mais)

I am not a poetry person, though I like some of Dickenson's poems. Her self aggrandizing suffering fits with mental stance for most of my life of bearing a secret sorrow (usually because of some romantic disappointment.) Her secret sorrows seem to be about a minister with whom she had a spiritual relationship & meeting of minds that made her call herself his wife. But much is shrouded in mystery, which makes her story so interesting.

Although I'd read another biography of her 30 years ago, I'd missed that so much of her writing had to do with spiritual things, and that she held out from professing her faith despite pressure from her school and family. She believed but was not sure.… (mais)