Sex variant women in literature

Later in her life Ellen described Emily as maddeningly unsociable, but as having “a brilliant and very appealing sudden gaze when she allowed her eyes to be seen.”

Immediately upon Ellen’s departure, Emily suffered an attack of erysipelas so severe that her arm had to be lanced, “accompanied—unromantically—by liver complaint.” The indication that her general health was not good Moore considers puzzling.

In view of modern psychosomatic theory, this illness is highly revealing, for skin and gall bladder complaints are recognized symptoms of emotional tension or disturbance. It seems fairly evident that Emily was strongly (even if perhaps unconsciously) drawn to Ellen Nussey. Under the circumstances the latter’s visit would have been a period of intense stimulation and strain. At the withdrawal of the exciting presence the nervous reaction was equally intense, and her body registered a deprivation which her proud and independent spirit would not willingly have admitted to consciousness.

There is also internal evidence of variance to be gleaned from Emily’s poetry, despite the angry insistence of one critic that “Emily Brontë’s own voice turns to nonsense the hundreds of pages of biography based on [such] subjective interpretation.”[5] The critic is Fannie Ratchford, whose separate volume, The Brontës’ Web of Childhood, skillfully reconstructs the two sequences of remarkable legend composed during adolescence by Charlotte and Branwell, and Emily and Anne respectively. But in her impatience with subjectivity Mrs. Ratchford goes to the other extreme of regarding these creations as spontaneously generated and quite unrelated to the lives of their creators. Thus, her discovery that cryptic initials heading Emily’s most “masculine” poems stand for male characters in the Gondal epic leads her to the outburst quoted above. Yet she herself points out that the poems in question were composed over a period of twelve years, and that “lack of agreement between chronology of composition and story sequence shows that they were not written as progressive plot incidents but were merely the poetic expression of scenes ... and emotions familiar to her inner vision....” Ratchford also admits that “only a small percent of the poems carry headings, and [these] ... raise as many problems as they solve. Varying sets of initials appear for the same character ... G. S. in one poem is a boy, in another a woman.”[6]

Thus it seems probable that Emily’s lyrics sprang from her own experience, and that the confused initials represent an effort to incorporate them into some whole which would not betray their intimacy. (In the end she achieved her catharsis in prose through Wuthering Heights.) For lyric poetry is the most personal of all modes of expression, and Emily was morbidly reticent. All Brontë scholars know the story of Charlotte’s “accidental” reading in 1845 of her sister’s jealously guarded manuscript, and of the violent quarrel which followed. In Charlotte’s own moderate words:

It is certain that many poems, along with many letters, were sacrificed to Emily’s passion for privacy.

The most enigmatic chapter in Emily’s history covers the years from 1835 through 1838. All critics agree on the evidence of her poetry that during this time she underwent the major emotional experience of her life, one which gave rise to poems of nightmare, guilt, tragic separation and desire for death, and one which also contained the seeds of the mutually destructive love of Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, written nearly a decade later. Emily’s correspondence from this period has been lost or destroyed, Charlotte’s few surviving letters have undergone cutting on her part which leaves them barren, and one must infer pointed expurgation. The precise dating of Emily’s poems written before 1839 might help solve the mystery, but for such precision scholars have striven in vain. The latest and best established chronology, that of Hatfield, will be accepted here.

It is known that for three months in late 1835 Emily was a pupil at Roe Head, a boarding school where Charlotte was engaged as teacher. Her speedy withdrawal was laid to Charlotte’s concern for her health; and as her poems before that date indicate that she could not be happy away from the moors and could not endure any sort of constraint, she may well have been literally sick for the freedom of home. Upon her return there, Anne went to Roe Head in her place, and Emily was left in Haworth with Branwell, who must have been sad enough company. He had just failed neurotically in his intention to study at the Royal Academy and was spending his time as a drunken idler at the village tavern. It is because so few poems and so few letters to or from her absent sisters remain from this interim that the hypothesis of a questionable relationship between brother and sister has grown up, and of course, Emily’s rapid decline and death within a year of Branwell’s in 1847 lends some support to the theory. But her poetry bearing the date of 1836 is emotionally thin and immature, and critics are agreed that the major change in it dates from the following year.

The single external event in her life at that time was a teaching engagement at Law Hill, of which all that is known certainly is that it continued for at least six months during 1837. Some scholars hold that it began in the fall of 1836, others that it continued well into 1838. There are traces of evidence to support both contentions, but whether it lasted six months or sixteen, it was, beyond question, Emily’s longest absence from Haworth till then. Following Hatfield’s dating of her poems, one can trace first the impact of new scenes (February 1837), nostalgia for the moors, and a wish to “be healthful still and turn away from passion’s call.” Then in sequence (how rapid one cannot say) come abysmal self-distrust; nightmare; melancholy; the agony of separation (November, 1837); more desperate melancholy (through 1838); and finally in late October and early November, 1838, two poems of passionate and bitter reproach to a faithless feminine love: “I knew not ’twas so dire a crime To say the word adieu,” and “Light up thy halls—and think not of me!” Whatever experience produced these intense, immediate and certainly autobiographical outcries must have occurred during a period when, as a letter to Charlotte testifies, her boarding-school responsibilities absorbed her from six in the morning until sometimes eleven at night, and where supervision would have made association with a man impossible. In view of her earlier quick withdrawal from Roe Head, the fact that she endured such conditions for even six months is remarkable.

It is reasonable to imagine that at Law Hill she met and fell ardently in love with another woman—whether teaching colleague or senior student—and that the emotion was sufficiently mutual for Emily to envision some such lasting companionship as Charlotte dreamed of with Ellen Nussey. (Indeed, Moore’s emphasis upon the beauty, intellectual and social capacities, and personal charm of Miss Elizabeth Patchett, the school’s forty-four-year-old headmistress, suggests the possibility of Emily’s superior having lit the flame reflected in her verse.) The pattern of such dormitory dramas, whoever the actors, is fairly constant. One young woman is aglow with excitement and an often illusory sense of complete rapport; the other is flattered and genuinely responsive until the emotional voltage runs too high. Then withdrawal follows on the one side, hurt and misunderstanding on the other. Whether Emily encountered Victorian admonition from a colleague, or the news from some charming young creature (as she toyed with her new ring) that she was about to enter love’s real province, it is certain that Emily felt herself “betrayed.” Actually, this proud woman of twenty or twenty-one, in the grip of authentic passion, must have been brought to see her feeling through other eyes as something between a juvenile Schwarm and that horror the very name of which Saint Paul forbade to be uttered. It is probable that she became at once either physically or nervously ill and perhaps left the school (inexplicable in the middle of a term), hiding jealously the reason for her going, and blotting it from all records. (Interestingly enough Moore tells us that Miss Patchett married a local vicar “shortly after Emily’s departure from Law Hill.” Was it her halls that were lit, and for her wedding, in November 1838?)[8]

George Eliot. The eye in search of variance inevitably turns next to the George in England who had not yet assumed her masculine cognomen—Mary Ann Evans. This novelist was undoubtedly masculine in many ways, both physically and psychologically; which of these traits were inborn and which bred of the childhood adoration of father and brother so vividly reflected in Mill on the Floss, it is impossible to say. But George Eliot’s masculinity does not seem to have affected her emotional life. There are, to be sure, a handful of very close women friends cited in the Hansons’ recent biography:[1] Sara Hennell, near her own age and, like her, rather masculine; Mary Sibree, the first young girl she tutored; and later Bessie Parkes and Barbara Leigh Taylor, young feminists a half dozen years or more her junior. All of these are mentioned as parties to friendships which were briefly more or less emotional on one side or both. But even so, two considerations exclude their subject from a list of variant women until more evidence is at hand. The concern felt by two of the girls’ families about Mary Ann Evans’s influence was caused not at all by her emotional temperament but by her religious unorthodoxy. Furthermore, nothing in George Eliot’s work reflects any interest in emotional connections between women or even an awareness of them. Her life, as soon as she was freed from enslavement to her invalid father, was a succession of excitements involving men, men who captivated her emotions regardless of whether they were married or (like Herbert Spencer) incapable of passion. She was that case so disheartening to the hereditary theorist—an extremely mannish woman not obsessed with women but with men.

Margaret Fuller. The life of an American contemporary of George Sand and Emily Brontë offers similar suggestions of variance, while her surviving work is almost equally empty of it. Margaret Fuller, New England transcendentalist, feminist, and journalist, is remembered for her Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which played a part in this country comparable to Wollstonecraft’s Vindication in England; for her editing of the short-lived Dial, and for her work at home and abroad on the staff of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. She is also remembered for her friendships with Emerson and Carlyle and her efforts to familiarize her countrymen with Italian and German literature, especially the work of Goethe. She is thought to have been the model for Holmes’ Lurida Vincent and for the Zenobia of Hawthorne’s Blythedale Romance. Catherine Anthony, in one of the first “psychoanalytic” biographies of this century,[1] reveals the rigorous asceticism and intellectual forcing imposed upon her during childhood by that puritan idealist, Timothy Fuller, and argues for a father fixation as the key to her later emotional life.

It was not until the age of thirty-four that she experienced her first romantic love for a man, the German Jew James Nathan, whom she met during her first year in New York. When he expressed passion for her, she was deeply disturbed, even shocked, and he soon returned to Europe, partly, it is thought, to escape from her stubbornly “platonic” hold upon him. Four years later in Italy she lived for a season with the Marchesa d’Ossoli, whom she married secretly after discovering that she was pregnant, as Wollstonecraft had done in the case of Godwin. Versions of both these heterosexual experiences were permitted to survive by Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, who edited her Memoirs, but, says Mason Wade in a later biography, “These friends of Margaret, in their regard for her memory, inked out, scissored or pasted over a third of the never-to-be-duplicated mass of material they had before them.”[2]

The first thirty-four of her fifty years were not, however, emotionally empty. At the age of thirteen she fell deeply in love with an Englishwoman visiting in Cambridge, the first member of a more cosmopolitan society than she had before encountered. When after a few months her adored departed she fell into melancholy, was unable to eat, and declined so much in health that her father packed her off to a boarding school to find companionship of her own age. She was far too precocious and self-absorbed to be popular with the girls, and her chief interest was in a sympathetic teacher with whom, as with her English idol, she afterwards corresponded for years. Family cares and financial stress after her father’s death apparently filled her late teens and early twenties to the exclusion of personal contacts, and no emotional record survives from the year when she taught in Bronson Alcott’s school. At the end of a succeeding period as headmistress of a school in Providence, however, she parted from the boys without emotion, but the girls, whose adoration had been precious to her, all wept at losing her and she wept with them. (Most of these incidents were not expurgated from her Memoirs.)

Her next five years, between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-four, were devoted to her famous “Conversations,” hybrids between a French salon and a modern seminar. For a course of these two-hour sessions held in the homes of the participants her fee was twenty dollars, in a day when tickets to as many lyceum lectures cost only two; still her group never numbered less than thirty. Her intellectual brilliance and the magnetism she exerted upon her exclusively feminine audiences have become legendary, and it is quite evident from the various accounts of them that a strong emotional rapport with women contributed to her success. It is notable that the evening course given one winter to a mixed group which included many distinguished intellectual men was a comparative failure.

Considering her emotional inhibitions as shown in her affair with Nathan, and, more particularly, in view of the rigorous prudery of Boston at the time, it is unlikely that any of her numerous feminine attachments reached the point of overt expression. But the student of variance must forever regret the loss of those confessional passages obliterated by the three moral vigilantes who edited them.

The only other episode of possible variant significance in her life (aside from her translating a part of the work of Günderode) was the effort she made to meet George Sand when she reached Europe in 1846. The famous woman was for a month or so away from Paris, and after her return she failed to answer Margaret’s note begging an interview. After a week of silence Margaret “took her courage into her hands” and risked a call. A servant’s error in reporting her name might even then have sent her away disappointed, but she persisted, and finally reached Sand in person. Writing to a friend about the encounter, she says:

Though pressed for time, Sand kept her for the greater part of the day and talked freely to her. Afterwards Margaret decided that despite her hostess’s constant smoking, and the fact that she had undoubtedly had “something of the bacchante in her life,” she had never liked any woman better than she liked George Sand.

Adah Isaacs Menken. The difference in emotional climate between puritan Boston and exotic New Orleans could not be better illustrated than by setting against Margaret Fuller’s life that of the actress, dancer, poet and adventuress who attained fame as Adah Isaacs Menken. Encyclopedias are monotonously insistent that she was born Dolores Adios Fuertes, daughter of a Spanish Jew. Various other sources, among them the preface to an 1890 edition of her poems,[1] claim that she was Adelaide McCord, daughter of a storekeeper in a small Louisiana town. The truth is perhaps obscured forever by what another authority describes as “her own habit of romancing about herself and her origin.”[2] Thus some of the following picturesque details offered by Clement Wood should doubtless be liberally salted, but many are demonstrably true.

Although, like Margaret Fuller, Menken was precocious enough to be translating the Iliad at twelve, she was also dancing in the New Orleans Opera House, and by the age of fourteen “she was a woman, whose sensitive beauty was the pride of the town.” By the time she was twenty she had the following adventures to her credit: marriage at sixteen to “a nobody whose very name has vanished,” who abused and abandoned her; a season of dancing which made her the darling of the Tacón Theatre in Havana; a tour with an amateur theatrical company in Texas, followed by her founding a newspaper in the town of Liberty; being captured by Indians, and rescued by white rangers. A year after the first publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass she brought out a volume, Memoirs (or Memories [?] now lost) which is said to have “received the placid fervor it deserved.”[3]

A few months before she was twenty-one she married a musician in Galveston, Alexander Isaacs Menken, adopted his faith and his name, and retained both to the end of her short but crowded career, though this included several later marriages. She subsequently returned to the stage and toured the south, part of the time in Edwin Booth’s company. In Cincinnati she paused long enough to study sculpture, and became the leading contributor to the Cincinnati Israelite. Her article on Baron Rothschild’s admission to parliament won her his epithet of “inspired Deborah of her adopted race.” Moving north to Dayton, she took up military drill and was elected captain in the Life Guards. Here she met a pugilist, John Heenan, known as the Benicia Boy, whom she married a year later in New York, but, like her first unlucky choice, he was brutal, and she subsequently tried matrimony with the humorist known as Orpheus C. Kerr, and again with “one John Barclay.” Menken died, Kerr she divorced, but in what manner she freed herself of her other mates is uncertain.

Her success as an actress seems to have been moderate until in New York in 1861 she accepted the part of Mazeppa in a dramatization of Byron’s melodramatic poem. This male part involved being bound to the back of a fiery Arab steed, feet in his mane, head hanging from his crupper, and “she glittered in this role from Albany to London, Paris and Vienna.” In Europe she enjoyed social and literary, as well as dramatic, success. “Nobility and royalty paid court to her; the aristocracy of art thronged to her salon.” She was the intimate friend of Gautier, Dumas, Charles Reade, Swinburne, and Dickens, and in 1868 dedicated to the last of these her second volume of poems, Infelicia.[4] Within a few months of its publication she fell ill and died at the age of thirty-three.

Menken’s place in the present study is due to James Gibbons Huneker’s comment in Steeplejack:

Upon examination, the volume Infelicia reveals no more obvious lesbianism than do the poems of Brontë or Labé. Its impersonal poems, pleas for the Jews or for industrially exploited women, explain the interest of Dickens and Reade, champions of social reform. The tragic desperation in most of the love lyrics suggests, along with her twice marrying sadistic men and her success as the victimized Mazeppa, a strain of masochism which may account for her appeal for Swinburne (who was not, craving Huneker’s pardon, too sympathetic to lesbian ladies, but who was obsessed by pain). Three poems, however, are obviously addressed to women. “Dying” and “Answer Me” allude to soft and tender hands, warm bosoms. “A Memory; To a Dead Woman” says:

In “The Release,” a subjective autobiographical fragment, she says:

These poems to, or about, women come nearest to serenity and peace of any in the volume. The rest reproach men for their cruelty to the women who bear their children, or, like “Resurgam,” they represent the author as dead though still beautiful, crowned with flowers, and fêted—her spirit murdered by the man she loved.[8]

As to the Hattie Tyng Griswold mentioned by Huneker, she is listed in Frances Willard’s Woman of the Century[9] as a successful Wisconsin journalist and a friend of Violet Paget, the British art critic and philosopher, who wrote under the name Vernon Lee. No record seems to exist of her connection with Menken outside the newspaper articles mentioned by Huneker, which have not been consulted here. As in the case of Sand and Wollstonecraft, interest in Menken’s spectacular career has diverted attention from possible variant experience, but it appears to be precisely such stormy and passionate spirits who turn to women for the happiness they are unable to find with any number of men. It is interesting that Clement Wood should say, in contradiction to Huneker, that she deserved as much poetic acclaim as Whitman, but “was a woman, with a softer voice.”[10] The volume alluded to, Memoirs, has not been seen by the present writer, but honest critical judgment compels some qualification of Wood’s praise in view of the known Infelicia, though there are many pages in the latter which are not “bad” poetry.

“Michael Field.” Another “poet” in the present group is Michael Field, pseudonym of two late-Victorian Englishwomen, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper. They were aunt and niece, but actually they were much closer than this relationship indicates, for when Edith’s mother was left an invalid after the birth of a second child, Katherine and her mother moved in to care for the family, and Katherine assumed complete responsibility for the three-year-old Edith. Katherine was then seventeen and had studied at Newnham and in Paris, where she had been in love with the older brother of a French friend. This man died, and the loss is reflected faintly in her first published poetry a decade later. There is no indication of any other heterosexual interest on either woman’s part throughout their lives.

By the time Edith had reached late adolescence and Katherine was approaching thirty, their relation had become one of adult equality, and they were active together in university life in Bristol, though apparently more in debating, woman’s suffrage, and anti-vivesection societies than in formal university courses. In 1881, when one was thirty-three and the other nineteen, they published jointly a first book of verse, “by Arrand and Isla Leigh,” which received little critical comment. It was two years later that they hit upon the pseudonym of Michael Field, and when Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund appeared in 1883 it was hailed as the work of a new and promising talent. They published, in all, eleven volumes of verse and nineteen or twenty poetic dramas, mostly on classical or historical themes; but, as Sturge Moore says in the introduction to their joint memoirs, Works and Days:

The handful of volumes which have been available for inspection seem far from works of genius; nevertheless, the poems have as much freshness and lyric charm as those of many other minor writers who are repeatedly included in anthologies. The plays, though they exhibit careful historical scholarship, are weighted with moral or feministic message and seem artificial and heavy. The one that reached the stage in their own day was an immediate failure.

There is evidence in the luxurious format of their privately printed volumes, and in the description of the house in Richmond where they lived after Mr. Cooper’s death, that they were blessed with ample means, and beyond doubt their thirty-five years of adult life together were happier than the lives of most Victorian spinsters. They cultivated the acquaintance of all the surviving nineteenth-century poets, and derived much excitement from moderate friendships with the aging Browning and Meredith. But the Victorian era as a whole was disinclined to honor two “Platonists” as the previous century had done, and their closest friends were a pair of Royal Academy artists, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, who lived together near them in a relationship evidently comparable to their own. That they did not escape disapprobation is indicated indirectly in several of the entries in Works and Days. When they first recognized Ricketts and Shannon at an art exhibition they hesitated long before speaking, uncertain how such a gesture might be received, even though Ricketts had designed the cover for one of their recent volumes. After attending another “private view” one Sunday afternoon in 1889, Katherine made much in their journal of being greeted by Fairfax Murray. “We recognized that he was proud to manifest to the world that we were his friends.”[2] And in connection with one of their volumes of verse, Long Ago (1889), based on fragments from Sappho, Katherine told Browning that “we meant to do no more harm than George Herbert, when he took a text from Holy Writ and wrote a hymn thereon.” The harm they were accused of having done is not mentioned.

The relation between the two women is more difficult to analyze than any so far encountered. Some time before the publication of their first volume of poems they were moved to a step best described in a later poem of Katherine’s:

This, along with certain other poems (notably the “Third Book of Songs” in Underneath the Bough), leaves no possible doubt about the intensity or the variance of their mutual emotion. Not even Colette, however, could assign a masculine or a feminine role to one or the other. Sir William Rothenstein, in his preface to Works and Days, describes “Michael” (Katherine) as “stout, emphatic, splendid and adventurous in talk;” “Field” (Edith) as “wan and wistful, gentler in manner, but equally eminent in the quick give and take of ideas.”[4] A good photograph of the two women shows Edith’s features to be of a decidedly boyish cast and her hair short. In the memoirs the two use a wealth of nicknames, masculine, feminine or neuter, and either may refer to the other by the male pronoun. It seems as though they tried to think of themselves as a single bisexual personality, and in one place Katherine says of the Brownings: “These two poets, man and wife, wrote alone; each wrote, but did not bless and quicken one another at their work; we are closer married [italics hers].”[5]

They exhibit consciousness of the physical possibilities between women more frankly than any other writers except for the portrayal of fictional characters. This is particularly striking in Edith’s account of an attack of scarlet fever she suffered while they were travelling in Germany. Katherine fought an entire hospital staff in order to occupy a room with her, and Edith writes later: “I have my love close to me.... Looking across at Sim’s little bed I realize she is a goddess, hidden in her hair—Venus. Yet I cannot reach her.... I grow wilder for pleasure and madder against the ugly Mädchen”[6] (the nurse who kept her in bed). Yet when another nurse, middle-aged, becomes infatuated and annoys her with constant caresses, she says:

Much later in their lives, Edith, whose health was never robust, failed steadily, learned she had cancer, and turned to the Church of Rome. Katherine followed her into that church more slowly and, one infers, partly to reassure the younger convert that they would never be separated here or hereafter, just as she concealed the fact that she also was suffering from the same dread ailment as long as Edith lived, in order to spare her added vicarious pain. This religious move resulted from the influence of a brilliant Jesuit, who had made their acquaintance through enthusiasm for the mystic exaltation of their verse. There is no hint of struggle, change of habit or attitude, or anything resembling “repentance” in either woman, and this fact, along with the “Anteros” allusion above, suggests that the two had achieved some sort of limitation upon expressing their love which satisfied their stringent Victorian consciences.

Probably the complete manuscript of Works and Days included other psychological and philosophical discussion of such relationships, and perhaps also more details of the poets themselves, for Sturge Moore mentions having reduced the text considerably in the interests of good taste, and of omitting matter likely to be of little interest to later students of literature. Unfortunately, biographers and literary historians often prune material of foremost interest to students of emotional psychology.

Emily Dickinson. If Emily Brontë was for a century a British enigma, Emily Dickinson has for almost as long been New England’s “little sphinx.” Many who do not know her poems will have heard of her self-cloistration at thirty in the family house in Amherst, her wearing only white thereafter, and her habit of communicating even with old friends through the open door of a room in which she remained stubbornly invisible. Favoring the growth of such legends are a life as empty of outward event as the earlier Emily’s, poems with a higher emotional charge and no fictional disguises, and a history of publication mysteriously complicated by family feud. Some critics have observed that in nineteenth century New England recluses and eccentrics were not uncommon, particularly among old maids and old bachelors who sometimes worked at becoming “characters.” Some have elucidated in detail the family quarrel between surviving sister and sister-in-law which blocked publication. But none have dared to pretend that Emily’s life was absolutely normal.

A tragic love affair has been the natural hypothesis, and search for clues has produced an embarrassment of possible candidates. All Emily’s letters resemble her poems enough in economy and intensity so that despite her own elision and the subsequent editing many still approach love letters in effect. On their internal and some external evidence, she seems to have felt real warmth for a number of men with whom she enjoyed intellectual communion, from her near-contemporary George Gould in the late 1840s to Judge Otis Lord, her father’s friend, eighteen years her senior, in her later life. To each of a half-dozen potential candidates, one biographer or another has assigned responsibility for the heartbreak in her poetry and her willful seclusion. But in every case, objective support is meager, and the necessary assumptions have reflected the theorist’s predilections quite as much as his subject’s.

As the quantity of poetry and correspondence in print has increased, however, the different editors’ versions of some duplicate material have invited comparison, and from this and much peripheral research Rebecca Patterson has suggested in The Riddle of Emily Dickinson (1951) a pattern of departure from the norm which brings its subject within the range of the present study. Mrs. Patterson presents the integrated results of three separate investigations. First, she has studied Emily’s life story exhaustively: the puritan background in Amherst; emotional tensions in the family circle (Emily’s father, whom she both loved and inwardly defied, forbade at least one marriage and tried to prevent her writing); Emily’s feelings, convincingly diagnosed as ambivalent, toward the men who captured her interest; and her sometimes more absorbing attachments to certain women. Second, Mrs. Patterson has compiled the objective and emotional biography of Kate Scott Anthon of Cooperstown, New York. This tall, striking, and passionate woman she shows to have been the product of a relatively cosmopolitan milieu, to have been emotionally attracted to women from adolescence in boarding school to ripe old age on the continent (despite a couple of satisfying if short-lived marriages), and to have met and violently loved Emily Dickinson when both young women were about twenty-nine. Third, she has collated all available versions of Emily’s poems and letters (in some of which the sex and number of pronouns were altered or lines omitted by the poet herself or censoring editors), and has re-established chronology which was either deliberately falsified or wishfully confused by the editors to support the legend of a male lover. However unpopular Mrs. Patterson’s hypothesis of a variant passion for Kate Anthon may be, it partly explains the erratic behavior of both the poet herself and her surviving relatives as motivated by fear of scandal. (Sue Gilbert Dickinson in particular, whom Emily’s sister Lavinia branded a procrastinator and obstructionist in the matter of publication, had her reasons.)

From minutely assembled external evidence as well as careful interpretation of poems and letters, Mrs. Patterson reconstructs the following emotional history. During late adolescence Emily was passionately attached to Sue Gilbert, afterward her sister-in-law, a girl who had similarly attracted Kate Scott during their boarding school days. But Sue herself was cold in both relationships, and left Emily wholly unaware of the true nature of her emotion. A decade later, Kate Scott Anthon appeared, the widow of a loved first husband who had died after only two years of married life. Kate was beautiful, socially and emotionally mature, hungry for love, and much taken with Emily at sight. The two women’s association was not protracted, probably amounting in all to less than two months; however, it was highly concentrated during Kate’s semi-annual visits over a period of two years to Sue Gilbert Dickinson who lived next door to Emily.

The contact begun in March 1859 flowered then and during August of that year into an intense mutual absorption. Emily even showed Kate the poetry of which her own family still knew nothing. This flowering included some demonstrativeness, apparently Emily’s first congenial experience of caresses, and therefore an electrifying revelation. In March 1860, during Kate’s third visit to Sue, Emily’s sister Lavinia was absent from home, and the two young women spent a night together. This experience enlightened Emily as to at least the nature of passion (a lesson of which many Victorian spinsters died ignorant), but to Kate’s desire for complete intimacy, Emily reacted with shock and withdrawal. Kate knew herself well enough to be aware that she could not continue a close association on Emily’s puritanic terms, and she avoided visiting Sue again for more than a year, though for a time she continued to correspond with Emily. The latter was too inexperienced to understand quite what had happened, and for six months she continued to be—as she had been since first meeting Kate—happier and more out-going in her personal relationships and correspondence than ever before or after.

Then, at the beginning of 1861, Kate ceased to reply to Emily’s letters, of which only three have been published and probably few more survived. Kate was not silent from indifference; Mrs. Patterson assembles sound evidence that she too suffered bitterly. But she was apparently convinced that their relation had reached an impasse, and by April 1861 Emily’s pain and veiled reproach so troubled her that she wrote terminating their connection. This month marked the beginning of Emily’s withdrawal from social contacts. She refused particularly to see anyone who might mention Kate’s name, for fear of her own reaction if she heard it spoken. Meanwhile, Kate had turned for comfort to her friend, Gertrude Vanderbilt, wife of a New York judge and some six years her senior, on whom she evidently could depend for complete understanding. Mrs. Vanderbilt seems to have offered sane advice—which may even have preceded Kate’s final letter to Emily—and some religious consolation. When in the fall of 1861 Kate felt constrained to visit Sue Dickinson, knowing that to sever the connection without reason would arouse awkward conjecture, she played safe by bringing Mrs. Vanderbilt with her. To the still uncomprehending Emily, this effective preclusion of private interviews was a bitter final blow.

All this, it must be admitted, is a fairly detailed reconstruction of events for which proof positive can never be produced. But it did not deserve the wholesale damnation which critics accorded Mrs. Patterson’s volume when it appeared. Other biographers had noted the meticulous omission of any descriptive detail in Emily’s love poems which could give a clue to the beloved’s identity or personality. The present writer, still little acquainted with Dickinson (to her shame be it said) when Bolts of Melody appeared in 1945, was assured by several lovers of Emily’s poetry, on the internal evidence in that volume, that the poet belonged in this study. Let us grant, then, that Emily may in her early life have felt “idealistically amorous” (as one critic phrases it) toward certain young men, notably Gould and Newton, with whom her associations came to nothing. (Both died quite young, which might partially account for Emily’s concern with death.) She also probably fell in love with the Reverend Charles Wadsworth whom she met in Philadelphia in 1854. (This has the vote of Mark Van Doren, specialist in historical research.) But she saw Wadsworth no more than three times again, probably only twice, and then only for a few hours. In her late twenties—a dangerous age for emotional spinsters—she met the first woman whose mind matched her own. She was off guard precisely because her new friend was a woman; but Kate Anthon had virtually a man’s emotional approach. An explosive result was almost inevitable. Mrs. Patterson’s demonstration of how closely a new out-going happiness in poems and letters paralleled Emily’s meeting with Kate Anthon, how exactly the beginning of her period of “agony” coincided with Kate’s withdrawal, is too apt to be dismissed as absurdly biased special pleading.