... mesmerizing ... [This book review can't do justice to the] years of research by Dobrow ... Some of the book’s interpretative chapters do grow repetitive, however, and one or two points are over-emphasized... No matter. If you’re interested in 'America’s greatest poet,' intellectual property issues or juicy behind-the-scenes literary history, After Emily is your book.
In 1898, 12 years after the death of Emily Dickinson, an intrepid woman named Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) stashed a huge trove of Dickinson manuscripts, including 655 poems, into a camphorwood chest. That chest stayed locked for more than 30 years, when Mabel Todd instructed her daughter, Millicent (1880-1968), to open it. How Mrs. Todd came to possess that pile of Dickinson material is a story rivaling any old-fashioned Victorian bodice-ripper. And happily it’s the subject of Julie Dobrow’s long overdue study, 'After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet.”' ... At the end of her book, Ms. Dobrow wonders what Mabel and Millicent would think of her good work. Doubtless, they’d be very pleased.
Scholarly arguments about how Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, handled Emily Dickinson’s work during their years of editing and compiling the nearly 1800 poems discovered after Dickinson’s death will continue. But thanks to Tufts University professor Dobrow’s astonishing new research, readers gain a better understanding of their efforts ... Hopefully, Dobrow’s chronicle will draw readers back to Dickinson, whom Dobrow rightly names as America’s greatest poet.
While Dobrow notes that these statements reflect Todd’s perspective, she retains very little critical distance between her own narrative and the story as it was told by her subject ... Dobrow’s willingness to follow Todd’s interpretation of events matters for a key reason. It seems to have caused Dobrow’s biography to skip over what we do know about Susan: that Emily Dickinson adored her ... Despite her attention to Todd’s experience as shaped by gender, Dobrow’s book mostly side-steps the story of Dickinson and Susan, perhaps because this story would seem to weaken her argument about Todd — that we should be happy that it was Todd, not Susan, who edited Dickinson’s poems, and we should be happy about this because Todd developed a deep and personal and mystical knowledge of Dickinson’s mind ... There’s also something symptomatic about Dobrow’s treatment of Susan, for in the larger sense, Dobrow has missed the opportunity to tell the great story of a whole set of brilliant women living under gendered constraints in 19th-century Amherst, and bursting through them ... There’s also great irony in Dobrow’s failure to see the alliances among women who despised each other — because it is Todd who teaches us this lesson.
During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson didn’t publish much, but after she died, her brother’s mistress took up the cause of Dickinson’s verse ... Dobrow spent years in the massive Todd archives—Yale’s Sterling Library holds more than 700 boxes of diaries, journals, and notes about psychiatric sessions—in order to recount, with sympathy and nuance, Todd’s near obsession with editing Dickinson, securing a publisher, and publicizing the poet on the lecture circuit. While telling Todd’s story, the author sensitively explores the (much-criticized) editorial choices Todd made and the question of who was responsible for the 'legend' of Emily-the-recluse-in-white ... All entries in the voluminous literature on Dickinson are controversial—some will bristle at such a positive depiction of Todd or suggest that some of Dickinson’s relatives deserve more charity or credit. One hopes the controversy will simply bring increased attention to Dobrow’s fresh, remarkable account.
...Dobrow authoritatively traces the tortuous editorial and publication process that first brought Dickinson’s work to public attention, and sensitively explores her subjects’ interior lives, showing how Mabel suffered from being the other woman in Austin’s life and how Millicent struggled growing up in her charismatic mother’s shadow ... Impeccably researched using more than 700 boxes of the Todds’ personal documents, Dobrow’s narrative gives a fascinating glimpse into the lives of two tireless advocates for Dickinson’s work, demonstrating how poet and editors alike were 'all women pushing up against the boundaries of their times.'