Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and LanguageIn Maid as Muse, Aífe Murray explodes the myth of the isolated genius and presents an intimate, densely realized story of joined lives between Emily Dickinson and her domestic servants. Part scholarly study, part detective story, part personal journey, Murray's book uncovers a world previously unknown: an influential world of Irish immigrant servants and an ethnically rich one of Yankee, English-immigrant, Native American, and African American maids and laborers, seamstresses and stablemen. Murray reveals how Margaret Maher and the other servants influenced the cultural outlook, fashion, artistic subject, and even poetic style of Emily Dickinson. Irish immigrant Maher becomes the lens to a larger story about artistic reciprocities and culture-making that has meaning way beyond Dickinson. This below-stairs, bottom-up portrait of the artist and her family not only injects themes of class and ethnic difference into the story but also imparts subtle details and intimacies that make the study of Emily Dickinson urgent once again. In the kitchen pantry where she spent a good portion of each day, the outside world came to Dickinson. The "invisible" kitchen was headquarters for people mostly lost from the public record--and it was her interactions with them that changed and helped define who Emily Dickinson was as a person and a poet. |
Contents
Introduction Walking Backward to Something You Know Is There | 1 |
Warm and Wild and Mighty | 27 |
The 1850 Housework Compromise | 57 |
Turning with a Ferocity to a Place She Loved | 87 |
Of Pictures the Discloser | 133 |
Emily Dickinsons Irish Wake | 177 |
She Kept Them in my Trunk | 201 |
Afterword The Broadest Words are so Narrow | 221 |
Family Charts | 237 |
Notes | 253 |
Bibliography | 275 |
Illustration Credits | 291 |
Common terms and phrases
African American Amherst College April Aunt Austin Dickinson author's correspondence Bianchi born Boston brother Burton Collection Charles Thompson Clarinda Boltwood cook courtesy cousins daughter Dennis Scannell Dickinson Homestead domestic dress Edward Dickinson Emily Dickinson Face Emily Dickinson Journal England English Fanny father funeral garden girl Golden Vale Henry Hawkins Hiberno-English hired Homestead Houghton Library Hours of Emily housework immigrants Ireland Irish James Jay Leyda John Rickford June Kelley Family Kelley Square kitchen laborer language Lavinia letters lives Lucius Manlius Boltwood Mabel Loomis Todd Mack Maggie maid Margaret Maher Margaret Ó Mary Massachusetts Michael Michael Maher mistress mother nineteenth-century North Pleasant Street Ó Brien pallbearers Pleasant Street household poems poet poet's poetry recipe Richard Sewall Samuel Fowler senior Boltwoods servants sister Slievenamon stableman story Susan Tipperary Tom Kelley town University Press Vinnie wife Women writing wrote Yankee York