Lyndall Gordon > Quotes

“It was her religion to make the best of everything.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft – The Unconventional Genius Who Founded Modern Feminism and Influenced Political Philosophy

“So it was that Lavinia fired a shot against Sue’s publication. Her protest to Ward laid out the law of ownership. A writer might give a manuscript to someone else, but the possessor is not the owner. Legally, the copyright on the writing remains with writer, and upon death transfers to the writer’s heir. On the basis of Emily’s will, which left Lavinia ‘everything’, Lavinia claimed (pushing the point) that Emily had granted her exclusive rights to her papers, and though Emily gave copies of poems to others they were given simply for private reading ‘and not to pass the property in them, which is mine’. Unsurprisingly Susan challenged this. She had lost her husband to Mabel. Her friendship with Lavinia was being destroyed and now the thing she held most dear, her private relationship with Emily, was being ripped from her. She sounds a little desperate as she writes to Ward: ‘the sister is quite jealous of my treasure … All[?] [the poems and letters] I have are mine—given me by my dear Emily while living[,] so I can in honor do with them as I please.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Lavinia resented the way Todd underplayed Lavinia’s role in favour of her own. Money was not the main issue, nor even the prestige of association with strangely brilliant letters unlike any other. The crux was Mabel Todd’s advance, a step further on to Dickinson territory: her first step had won Susan; her second step had won Ned; her third, Austin, with Lavinia’s assent; a fourth step had failed to win over the poet herself, but Emily’s death had opened the way for a takeover of her papers.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Mabel Todd would take possession of Dickinson’s papers and market them on her own terms, so that the strange nature of the poet became obscured.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“A wreath of white daisies from the Dickinson meadow were the only flowers allowed.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Emily Dickinson would repeatedly draw on volcanic eruptions as metaphors for poetic expression.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“In the 1880s the focus of the feud had been adultery; in the 1890s the focus shifted to the divided treasure the poet had left behind. Who had the right to possess her? Who had the right to say what she was?”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Austin required all reference to sickness be cut. Consistent with secrecy was the refusal of the Norcross sisters to let Todd see the letters in their possession. These remaining witnesses to Emily’s ills in her teenage years, and to the treatment she endured in Boston in 1864 and 1865, shielded their cousin”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Two formidable difficulties at once presented themselves: half the correspondence—the letters Dickinson received—had been destroyed and her own letters are undated after 1855.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Abyss has no biographer—’, Emily Dickinson said. Truth is bottomless, and she herself almost invisible. After her death, letters from correspondents were burnt according to her instructions and soon legend replaced living fact.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“their voices too low to disturb the birds singing in the tall cherry trees.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“In her lifetime, Emily Dickinson had been called ‘the myth’; when she died, Todd saw her disappear more deeply into her ‘mystery’. Higginson introduced her to the public as a nunnish recluse who never thought of publication. He characterised her as ‘whimsical’, ‘wayward’, ‘uneven’ and ‘exasperating’. Actually, the blueprint for this character goes back to the poet herself:”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Here another myth was imposed on the poet: this time, a tyrannical father.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Mr Niles reaffirmed his adverse opinion. He had always thought it ‘unwise to perpetuate Miss Dickinson’s poems. They are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties & are generally devoid of the true poetical qualities.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“There are similar mutilations of many letters, especially Emily’s early letters to Austin, written when he was in love with Sue, and letters to Sue filled with Emily’s parallel, more entrancing ardour. All the mutilations are designed to obliterate the poet’s attachment to ‘Sister’.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“all words, scenes and claims of participants in the feud are documented in source notes. Though the feud began with adultery, Emily Dickinson became its focus after her death, each side battling for her unpublished papers. The issue was not so much money as the right to own the poet—the right to say who she was. Each side claimed to know, and fought to promote its legend. These legends still guard the entrance to the Abyss, for the feud persists even now. It started with a newcomer to Amherst who was drawn to the Dickinson family, and even more to its invisible poet.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“a feud over who was to own the poet: in the first instance, who was to have the right to publish her works; in the second, whose legend would imprint itself on the public mind.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“The first volume of Dickinson poems, bound in white leather and published on 12 November 1890, was handled in just the way that had put the poet off publication during her lifetime: the editors had tampered with the inventive punctuation and off-rhymes of the volcano speaking through ‘buckled lips’. Words were changed ‘to make them smoother’ (as Mabel Todd put it) and dashes eliminated. There were trivialising titles like ‘With a Flower’, ‘Playmates’ and ‘Troubled about many things’.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“strange scene takes place in the middle of 1891, when the biographical project has barely begun. Mabel, with Austin’s collusion, begins to tamper * with the overwhelming evidence of Emily’s bond with Susan. A booklet containing ‘One sister have I in the house / And one a hedge away’ is taken apart so as to remove the poem. Emily’s sewing holes are cut to disguise the poem’s place in the booklet, but though the page is thus mutilated, and torn in two places, it’s not destroyed for the sake of another poem on the verso. Using black ink the mutilator scores out all the lines and, most heavily, the climax ‘Sue—forevermore!”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Her coolness would have been all the more provocative clothed in the demure, doll-like corset and full skirt of the 1850s. Provocative, too, the sheath of black, in which she moved, an unpierced seal of grief.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Lavinia turned against Susan, the primacy of whose tie with Emily was ever more evident as letters came to light. Why had Emily confided in Sue and concealed this hoard from the sister who had protected her so faithfully?”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“she declared that speculation had no place in this book that had ‘in fact one purpose: to allow Emily Dickinson to speak for herself’. In this way, Todd disclaimed possession in a publication whose prime motive was, in actuality, an act of possession. Without referring to Mattie, it shot Mattie’s version of her aunt’s life to pieces with well-aimed rhetorical questions: who can know what Dickinson felt for others? Who can know what was momentous?”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Obscuring the drama of Emily Dickinson’s legacy have been the dustheaps of slander and sentimental conjecture that fortified the battlers in the war between the houses.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“The volume was a huge success, to the surprise of Houghton Mifflin who had rejected the poems, Niles who had grudgingly published them and the still rather offhand Austin. Five hundred copies of Poems were sold on the day of publication; the volume was reprinted eleven times in the first year; and the total sale, astonishing for a poet publishing a first collection, was almost eleven thousand copies.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“in terms that ignored the claims of the Dickinson camp: she had been painstaking in her scholarship, re-copying from manuscript instead of relying on her mother’s transcriptions, but in the many instances of poems jotted illegibly on cast-off scraps (on the inside of used envelopes—a favourite source of paper—on tiny bits of stationery pinned together, on discarded bills, on invitations and programmes, on leaves torn from old notebooks, on brown paper bags, on soiled, mildewed subscription blanks, on drugstore bargain flyers, on a wrapper of Chocolat Menier, on the reverse of recipes, on shopping lists and on the cut-off margins of newspapers), the editor had been daunted for a long time and it was only in the last three years that she had brought herself to decipher these.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“A double life is not surprising: it’s almost inevitable with intelligent women of Dickinson’s homebound generation.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“To approach Emily Dickinson through the feud, to search out why it happened and to follow its consequences to the present day, is one of many possible stories. A feud, at least, is verifiable.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“In Maine during the summer of 1920 they rowed around Hog Island to the side facing the open ocean, and here he asked her to marry him. She was emotionally dead, she confessed. He didn’t seem to mind.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“This was a girl who could tell the difference between the page that perishes and the page that endures.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“This has been a story of the buried life after all: Emily and Austin and Vinnie firing up at the spark Mabel touched off when she flirted with Austin’s buried passions and intruded on the Homestead and coveted the shadow-world of Sue and Emily. But to touch off that spark was Austin’s doing as well as Mabel’s. The feud was not wholly something that was done to the Dickinsons but was in some sense a sequel to what they were.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds