Emily Dickinson Face to Face

Starred review from April 24, 2023
Emily Dickinson springs to life in this remarkable, long-out-of-print biography written by her niece. The daughter of Dickinson’s older brother, Bianchi enchants immediately with anecdotes about being babysat by the poet on Sunday mornings when the rest of the household was in church. To the children, “Aunt Emily stood for indulgence,” secretly handing out sweets forbidden by stricter adults or eagerly “subscribing” when the children declared they were issuing their own newspaper. Bianchi shows that even as Dickinson withdrew physically from the wider world, she followed the shifting mores of the time, eagerly awaiting her adolescent niece’s reports about parties, clothes, and boys. While Bianchi reverentially describes her aunt’s observational genius (“a mystic inclusion in some higher beauty known only to herself”), she also wants readers to know Dickinson could be a bit of an art monster, whose friends weren’t afraid to call her on it. After one drove from out of town to visit her only to hear she was refusing “to come down from some whim,” he ignored the pretenses, calling up the stairs, “Emily, you rascal!—come down here!” She eventually did. Though millions of pages have been written about Dickinson, as poet Anthony Madrid notes in the book’s foreword, few have provided such a thrilling close-up portrait. Readers will be rapt from the first page.

May 1, 2023

Published in 1932 by Emily Dickinson's beloved niece Mattie, this slim volume combines two long-out-of-print recollections that draw readers close to a poet whose reclusive lifestyle made her "something of a fable" in her own lifetime. Privileged by her youth, Mattie was often accomplice to her Aunt Emily--"a friend more rare than any other we knew"--in her "elfin, mischievous strain," confiding in a stage whisper droll epigrams about visitors surveyed from the landing above. Amidst the vividly evoked "Finite Infinity" of her circumscribed world, readers encounter Emily, her white dress faintly glowing in the dim hallway dubbed "the Northwest passage," her low-pitched voice "almost husky at times of intensity, sweetly confidential." She gestures, turning an invisible key to lock the world away. Readers open a care package of flowers and cookies and beneath, a short scrawled note, elliptical and enigmatic as a Zen koan. A playful foreword by poet Anthony Madrid recounts the family squabbles over the poet's literary legacy that helped inspire Bianchi's memoir. VERDICT With charming anecdotes and moments vividly recalled, Bianchi's thoughtful account offers the rarest of first-hand glimpses behind Dickinson's swiftly drawn curtain, conveyed in searching and graceful prose worthy of its subject.

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