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My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson

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Overview

Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography, Alfred Habegger presents the first thorough account of Dickinson's growth-a richly contextualized story of genius in the process of formation and then in the act of overwhelming production. Building on the work of former and contemporary scholars, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books brings to light a wide range of new material from legal archives, congregational records, contemporary women's writing, and previously unpublished fragments of Dickinson's own letters. Habegger discovers the best available answers to the pressing questions about the poet: Was she lesbian Who was the person she evidently loved Why did she refuse to publish and why was this refusal so integral an aspect of her work Habegger also illuminates many of the essential connection sin Dickinson's story: between the decay of doctrinal Protestantism and the emergence of her riddling lyric vision; between her father's political isolation after the Whig Party's collapse and her private poetic vocation; between her frustrated quest for human intimacy and the tuning of her uniquely seductive voice.

Editorial Reviews

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) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Alfred Habegger

Alfred Habegger, formerly a professor of English at the University of Kansas, lives with his wife, Nellie, in northeastern Oregon. His previous books include Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature an da prize-winning biography, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

4.54 MB

Number of Pages

800

eBook ISBN

9781588361301

Awards

  • Library Journal Best Books of the Year

Excerpt from: My Wars Are Laid Away in Books by Alfred Habegger

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.