Defending Mrs. Todd

Researching Mabel Loomis Todd’s Hog Island story has been a long process and a labor of love.  I remember hearing in graduate school that if one knew the energy and time required to complete the work, most of us would have bailed on the idea of higher education.  I’m not sure I buy that, but the thought does come to mind that this project has taken such a chunk of my life that I am, indeed, amazed. 

At this point in the process I am poring through Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds.  If you are a Dickinson fan, you absolutely need this book in your library.  Gordon has researched deeply and puts forth a detailed time line of events that gives life and breath to Emily’s later years in Amherst.  

The book also puts a magnifying glass on the relationship between Austin Dickinson and his mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd.  Gordon tells the story of how Austin’s marriage to Susan was largely loveless by the time the new Amherst College astronomer, David Peck Todd, brought his young wife to Amherst in 1881.  Over the course of the next couple of years, Austin found love and comfort in the arms of Mabel, as husband David looked on, approvingly, as he engaged in his own set of marital indiscretions.  If it sounds like a version of Peyton Place or The Scarlet Letter, you wouldn’t be too far off.  It’s a pretty juicy story.  

I must admit that since I first made the connection between Emily Dickinson, Amherst, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Hog Island back in the early 1980s, I’ve been a fan of Mrs. Todd.  If it weren’t for her purchasing the island at the turn of the last century, Audubon never would have established an ecology camp there and I never would have had the chance to experience it’s abundant life and history.  My life, it would be fair to say, would be diminished.  

But when you get into the Emily Dickinson story as assembled by Lyndall Gordon, Mabel Todd takes on a much darker hue.  She participated in a long-term adulterous affair that ripped the Dickinson family apart so much that by the time Emily neared the end of her life, she recognized that the family would never heal.  She was right, too.   

After Emily died, if you know the story, it was Mabel Loomis Todd who began the arduous task of sifting through the poetry, translating a difficult handwriting, putting Dickinson verse into publishing form.  Emily’s sister, Lavinia, heir to the poems, worked with Mabel to see this work accomplished.  When the family broke into discord once again over copyright and royalty payments, it was Austin who admitted that the Dickinsons were ‘a queer lot.’  

Gordon does not skimp on placing blame on a deceitful Mabel Todd who, in her view, worked for years to disrupt the Dickinson family.  She seems to give Austin a pass on responsibility much more readily than Mrs. Todd.  She recognized the arduous task of working poems and letters into publishable form, but underneath it all, Mabel Todd is held largely responsible for Dickinson family discord. 

I have a hard time disagreeing with the details of the story Lyndall Gordon tells.  

Still, it was Mabel Todd who brought the Dickinson poetry before the general public.  Nobody else did.  Susan had a poem or two of Emily’s published in magazines, but no more than that.  Would someone else have promoted Emily if Mabel Todd did not?  Maybe, but the historical fact is it was Mrs. Todd who accomplished the feat.  

And for that, it seems to me, we Dickinson lovers should be eternally grateful.  

Photo:  Mrs. Todd working on the Dickinson letters on Hog Island (c. 1932).  Source:  Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University.