THE HIDDEN LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON

by John Evangelist Walsh ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 1971

In Poe the Detective (1967) Walsh unmasked the soi-disant master sleuth; now, curiosities apparently whetted by that success, he turns to one of the real mysteries of American letters with astounding and perhaps irreparable results. Putting together neglected twos and twos from standard sources, Walsh revises: e.g., Emily's 1850 epiphany was not a romance with Benjamin Newton but a first reading of Jane Eyre; Higginson's guarded tutorial attitude toward her and her work was fully justified; her ""Preceptor"" was family familiar Otis Lord and the affair less lofty than imagined, etc. Walsh's real heresies, concerning her character and motives and the genesis of her ""mature"" poetry, hinge on the crucial years from 1856 to 1858, for which no correspondence survives and during which Emily -- abruptly and unaccountably -- became the accomplished ""burry original"" of record. Walsh's contention is that she was neither original (save in her feeling for language and syntax) nor natural nor disinterested, but, contrary to legend, a self-dramatizing ambitious girl whose methods of composition amounted to ""plagiarism, but whisper it soft."" It was during the 1856-58 period that she encountered Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh, took its poet-heroine as her model, and began a deliberate apprenticeship of fashioning her own verses from Mrs. Browning's images and concepts. The evidence of countless comparisons seems unarguable (and disheartening -- even her eccentric uses of ""dark"" and ""circumference"" were thus acquired) and indicates further subsequent borrowings from Emerson, Lydia Child, etc. The discovery, and Walsh's interpretation of it, are as hard to assimilate as they will be to refute and vigorous counterefforts can be expected. The battle, and a readable, suspenseful style should draw unaccustomed crowds.

Pub Date: May 19, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION