FOCUS ON LITERATURE		English
Emily Dickinson’s Family and Friends			41
			February 2013

great reader, a sparkling conversationalist, and a book collector of wide-ranging interests. Late in life she traveled in Europe several times before her death from heart disease on May 12, 1913.

“I cannot tell when I first became aware that she [Emily Dickinson] had elected her own way of life. To us she had always been as fixed in her orbit as any other star. We had been born into her life. It never seemed to us that it should have been any other than it was.”

Martha Dickinson Bianchi (daughter of Susan Dickinson)

6. Mary Lyon (1797–1849), teacher

“Go where no one else will go. Do what no one else will do.”

Mary Lyon

Mary Lyon was a pioneering educator of women. In 1837 she founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which Emily Dickinson attended in 1847–48. Lyon was born in Buckland, Massachusetts, on February 28, 1797. She was one of seven children born to Aaron Lyon, a Scottish farmer, and Jemima Shepherd Lyon. Mary Lyon attended Buckland School from the age of four until she was thirteen, often boarding with local families since it was too far to travel home each day.

7.Abby Wood Bliss (1830–1915), friend “Our particular friend”

Emily Dickinson to Abiah Root, September 25, 1845

Abby Maria Wood Bliss was Dickinson’s “particular friend” and schoolmate at Amherst Academy. Together with Abiah Root, Harriet Merrill, and Sarah Tracy, Abby Wood and Emily Dickinson made up the close group of girlhood friends that the poet called “our circle of five”.

8. Abiah Root (1830–1915), friend

“I am not unconcerned Dear A. upon the all important subject, to which you have so frequently & so affectionately called my attention in your letters. But I feel I have not yet made my peace with God…. Abby & I talk much of the happy hours we used to spend together with yourself, Sarah & Hattie Merrill. Oh! What would I give could we all meet again. Do write me soon Dear A & let it be a long – long letter. Don’t forget – !!!!!”

Emily Dickinson to Abiah Root, September 8, 1846

Abiah Palmer Root came to Amherst to live with her cousins the Palmers and attend Amherst Academy, where she joined Emily Dickinson’s group of five close girlhood friends. After one or two terms at the Academy, “Biah” returned home to Feeding Hills, near Springfield, Massachusetts, and enrolled in Miss Campbell’s school. Thus the intimacy between the two girls came to rely upon the mail and Root’s occasional visits. Root clearly valued this correspondence, saving Dickinson’s letters, and making them available to Mabel Loomis Todd for her 1894 edition of the poet’s

Letters.

9.Samuel Bowles (1826–1878), friend “a creator of endless perspectives”

Susan Dickinson

Samuel Bowles was the owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican, New England’s most influential news-

paper of the day. Under Bowles’s direction, the paper became one of the country’s most progressive and influential newspapers. Progressive in his own politics, he helped to establish the Republican party, supported the antislavery movement, and advocated for social reform on a number of fronts.

10. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), correspondent “Dear friend, A Letter always feels to me like immortality be-

cause it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”

Emily Dickinson to T. W. Higginson, June 1869

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, co-editor of the first two collections of Emily Dickinson’s poems, was a man of astonishingly varied talents and accomplishments. A lifelong radical, he was an outspoken abolitionist, advocate of women’s rights, and founder of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. During the Civil War, he served as commander of the first Union regiment of freed African American soldiers. An ordained Unitarian minister, Higginson was also a prolific writer; his most highly regarded work was a memoir of his war years, Army Life in a Black Regiment.

11. Mabel Loomis Todd (1856–1932), correspondent

“That without suspecting it you should send me the preferred flower of life, seems almost supernatural.”

Emily Dickinson to Mabel Loomis Todd, late September 1882

Born November 10, 1856, Mabel Loomis Todd was the only child of Eben J. and Mary Wilder Loomis of Washington, D.C. Her father, a clerk in the Nautical Almanac Office, was an amateur naturalist and poet. A pretty, vivacious, talented young woman, she attended Georgetown Female Seminary, then studied piano and voice at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She cultivated, as well, her talents for flower-painting and writing, and had had stories published by the time of her marriage in 1876 to astronomer David Todd.

12. Carlo (1849–1866), dog “My Shaggy Ally”

Emily Dickinson to T. W. Higginson, February 1863

Carlo was Edward Dickinson’s gift to Emily, his eldest daughter, in the fall of 1849, presumably to accompany her on the long walks she enjoyed in the woods and fields of Amherst. Apparently a brown Newfoundland (perhaps a curly-coated Lesser Newfoundland, for Dickinson once jokingly sent one of the dog’s tawny curls to a friend purporting it to be her own), Carlo may have been procured from family friends, the Huntingtons, who raised litters of the massive breed at their farm on the Connecticut River in Hadley. If so, it adds wit to Dickinson’s naming Carlo after the pointer of St. John Rivers in her favourite novel at the time, Jane Eyre.

When Carlo died at about age 17 in January 1866, Dickinson announced his death in a terse letter to Higginson: “Carlo died. / E.Dickinson / Would you instruct me now?”. Months later, still feeling his absence, she paid him this tribute:

Time is a test of trouble But not a remedy –

If such it prove, it prove too There was no malady.

Compiled by Olga Kadomtseva

Source: http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org