Emily Dickinson continues to fascinate, not only for her brilliant, sui generis poetry but also for the reclusive life she lived. Yet just beyond the door of her self-constructed hermitage, all manner of intrigue and scandal was afoot, as her married brother, Austin, carried on an affair with his also-married neighbor, Mabel Loomis Todd, for more than a decade. At the time, this not-very-well-hidden indiscretion rocked close-knit Amherst, Massachusetts, but the true historical and literary significance of the connection rests in the fact that Todd, along with her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, would become central forces in bringing Emily Dickinson’s work to the public posthumously and therefore shaping how we continue to understand the poet’s work. In After Emily, Julie Dobrow tells the full story of this remarkable mother and daughter for the first time.

Emily Dickinson is a shadow figure in the events of After Emily.

Todd pushed against the parameters erected for women of her time, applying her intelligence and talents to music, painting and travel writing. Her diaries indicate that she was comfortable with the sexual aspects of love, and her marriage to David Todd, an astronomer, seems to have been remarkably open, with each aware of the other’s flirtations. After her husband took a teaching job at Amherst College, the Todds enjoyed the patronage of their influential neighbors, the Dickinsons. Mabel Todd was soon engaged in an emotional—and ultimately physical—affair with Austin Dickinson, who was twice her age. Dobrow suggests that this pair truly were soul mates, trapped in unhappy, or at least unfulfilling, marriages to others. Yet Todd also appears to have been quite self-centered in her pursuits. Her only child, Bingham, was raised by her grandparents until she was 8 years old, and when she came to live in Amherst with Todd, she was a victim of the damaging atmosphere generated by her mother’s affair—even if she didn’t fully understand what was going on at the time.

Emily Dickinson herself is a shadow figure in the story told here, much as she remained largely in the shadows of her own home in life. Indeed, Todd never met the poet face-to-face, despite living across a meadow from Dickinson and maintaining an intimate relationship with her brother. After the poet died, Dickinson’s sister, Lavinia, discovered the trove of poems the poet had never shared with the world, and she entrusted Todd with the task of getting them published. Todd found new purpose in this mission, but some of her decisions—including what Bingham would later call “creative editing,” such as changing some of Dickinson’s singular syntax and grammar—remain controversial. Still, Todd and Bingham’s role in preserving this great American poet’s writing is immeasurable. Their commitment to publishing and promoting their erstwhile neighbor’s work continued well into the 20th century, even as the family weathered personal crises.

This narrative of Todd’s and Bingham’s lives is elegantly and movingly told, if overly detailed at times. Both women were perhaps pack rats, and Dobrow encountered the blessing and the curse of 700 boxes of primary source material—hundreds of thousands of pages—among their private papers. She has done an admirable job sifting through the detritus to distill the essence of these women, their work and the world they inhabited.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Brian Jay Jones offers a richly detailed, admiring biography of Theodor Geisel, the man whom children and adults the world over would come to love as Dr. Seuss.

Is there anyone who doesn’t like Dr. Seuss? There may be a few grinches out there, but for the rest of us, his children’s classics never fail to evoke some blend of delight, amusement, wonder and nostalgia. However, nearly 30 years after his death, few people may know the story of the sui generis illustrator and writer whose real name was Theodor Geisel. Brian Jay Jones’ capacious new biography, Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination, provides a meticulously detailed yet thoroughly engaging look at the life and artistry of this American original. 

Jones, who has previously written biographies of George Lucas and Jim Henson, gives the full measure of the imaginative man who, from childhood, “turned minnows into whales.” Geisel was born in 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of a German-American brewer who was prosperous until Prohibition destroyed the family business. At Dartmouth, Geisel found his true calling working on the university’s  humor magazine. An ill-advised stint at Oxford did not secure him a graduate degree, but it did introduce Geisel to fellow American student Helen Palmer, who became his first wife and invaluable, albeit uncredited, collaborator. After Oxford, with dreams of writing the Great American Novel, Geisel tried the Jazz Age bohemian life. (He frequented the same Parisian cafe as Hemingway but never had the nerve to speak to him.)

Back in New York, Palmer convinced Geisel to concentrate on his true talents: humor, illustration and cartooning. The man who would give us Horton and the Cat in the Hat first hit it big in advertising, drawing humorous ad campaigns for such pedestrian products as mosquito repellent and motor oil. The work was lucrative, if unfulfilling, and Geisel flexed his creative muscles with cartoons, both topical and, during World War II, political. But still, he hankered to write children’s books. Considerable persistence and a stroke of luck led to the publication of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1937. While fame (and book sales) were slow, Dr. Seuss had arrived.

Becoming Dr. Seuss chronicles Geisel’s wholly creative, if not particularly scandalous, life but doesn’t shy away from darker aspects—particularly Palmer’s suicide, which may have been tied to Geisel’s affair with Audrey Dimond, who became his second wife, or Geisel’s lifelong wish to be taken more seriously as an artist rather than a “mere” children’s author. 

Overall, Jones paints a loving portrait filled with telling details. And when the 82-year-old Geisel returned to Springfield to find the real-life Mulberry Street lined with hundreds of cheering schoolchildren, it’s hard to imagine even the most hardened grinch’s heart failing to grow at least three sizes.

Once among the most widely read writers in the world, Rudyard Kipling has fallen from grace amid the reappraisals of post-colonialism. Viewed by many as the embodiment of the British Empire at its glorious and inglorious apex, his work—with the exception of adventure stories such as The Jungle Book and the perennially inspirational poem “If”—has been relegated to arcane status. In If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years, Christopher Benfey takes steps toward resurrecting Kipling’s reputation, focusing on a little-scrutinized but seminal decade during which he lived in, of all places, Brattleboro, Vermont. 

Born in Bombay, Kipling spent parts of his childhood in India and parts in England, which shaped his rootless future as a newspaper reporter and bestselling writer. His wife, Carrie, was American, and soon after their 1892 marriage they settled into a cottage in her native Vermont. Kipling had first visited the U.S. three years earlier, at which time he made a pilgrimage to meet his role model, Mark Twain. Benfey marks this meeting as the beginning of the Englishman’s American decade, and Twain was only the first of many prominent men of the Gilded Age whom Kipling would encounter, befriend and occasionally cross swords with. He toured the recently opened National Zoo with Theodore Roosevelt, for instance—a magical moment for this writer of animal tales. (Despite Teddy’s passion for the grizzly bear, Kipling preferred the industrious beaver.)

In If, Benfey ties Kipling’s stateside experiences to the literary works that germinated during his time here. The Jungle Book, Benfey speculates, grew out of a fascination with wolves, long eradicated from the surrounding New England woods. Captains Courageous, written amid a U.S.–U.K. diplomatic crisis that unsettled Kipling, was his first genuinely American story. And Kim, regarded by many as Kipling’s masterpiece, owes a great debt to the quintessentially American Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Kipling reluctantly left America in 1896 amid a family altercation. “There are only two places in the world where I want to live,” he claimed. “Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live in either.” Benfey suggests that Kipling held a conflicted affection for America similar to the one he had for India; both outposts shared an appealing unruliness and offered a limitlessness that stodgy old England could never supply. Yet his belief in the “white man’s burden” (a phrase he coined) clashed with U.S. notions of imperialism. For Kipling this idea was not merely about exploitation and profit but was tied to better intentions about helping “sullen peoples.” As leaden, misinformed and racist as Kipling’s views are in the 21st century, the complexity of his message endures.

An admiring new biography enshrines the great American poet’s formidable work and complex life.

When Elizabeth Bishop died 40 years ago, she was a respected poet with a small core of devotees, says Thomas Travisano, author of the new biography Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop. In the ensuing years, Bishop has come to be recognized as a significant American writer of the 20th century, whose precise, sometimes elusive work is built on technical mastery and filled with lyrical, singular observations. Travisano, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, is an unabashed fan of the poet, but his study, while admiring, is hardly a blind-eyed hagiography. An impressive blend of erudition and enthusiasm, Love Unknown offers an insightful, engaging look into this complex woman’s life and work.

Travisano suggests that much of what came to define Bishop—including her shyness, her chronic health problems, her drinking and, one would surmise, her poetic talent—grew out of two defining events from early childhood: her father’s death when she was only 8 months old and her mother’s subsequent mental breakdown, which essentially rendered young Elizabeth an orphan at age 5. Her upbringing was placed in the hands of both her paternal family in Massachusetts and maternal relatives in Nova Scotia, and this rootless shuttling back and forth most likely played a role in her lifelong wanderlust. As a child, Bishop was chiefly a loner, yet despite the emotional remove of those early years, she became an engaging, if retiring, adult. 

The portrait Travisano paints is one of a likable woman in control of her own destiny, good to her friends, comfortable in her own skin and certainly not apologetic about her eccentricities. Love Unknown is not a juicy tell-all, for Bishop’s life was not scandalous or scabrous. Even her lesbian identity in a less-accepting age seems to have been a fact she accepted and absorbed with little turmoil.

Travisano has spent decades immersed in Bishop’s work, and he beautifully incorporates her poetry and other writings throughout the narrative, finding both its sources and significance. Exploring Bishop’s seminal relationships with other poets, including Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, Travisano considers their reciprocal influences and places Bishop squarely in the context of her time, solidifying her place in the midcentury literary canon. Another friend and poet, James Merrill, famously remarked that Bishop “gave herself no airs. If there was anything the least bit artificial about her character and her behavior, it was the wonderful way in which she impersonated an ordinary woman.”

Bishop was anything but ordinary, as Love Unknown reminds us. And like the poet herself, the peerless poetry she left behind is also anything but ordinary.