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like Moby-Dick.... So unrelieved, the solemn ass even in humor. So hopelessly au grand serieux, you feel like saying: Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care? Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink.” Lawrence’s essay was the first indication that, much like the doubloon Ahab nails to the Pequod ’s mast, Moby-Dick is prismatically appropriated by each generation of readers. When first published it was viewed as an insane grab bag of religious allegory. In Lawrence’s time, it was the first novel to show Europe where the hands stood on the clock. Later it would be a source text for the New Critics, then the litter box for post-colonial theorists. In 1927, Moby-Dick ’s status all but assured, E. M. Forster devoted to it a long, cautious appraisal in Aspects of the Novel, and Melville’s greatest work, as we today know it, was born 76 years after its initial publication.

    Emily Dickinson achieved critical and popular acclaim much earlier than Whitman or Melville, though final validation did not occur until well into the twentieth century. “Just how good is she?” one critic demanded, with growing frustration, long after the appearance of the groundbreaking 1955 edition of Dickinson’s poems. Despite the relatively sudden acceptance of her work after her death, Dickinson’s survival is the least likely of all, subject to family quarrels and fortuitous breaks.
    Dickinson’s life is the stuff of biographers’ night terrors: so many relationships, and so much shadowy speculation concerning them. Dickinson’s brilliant letters, less than a tenth of which survive, are often as nebulous as scripture. Dickinson’s brother Austin is probably the most significant figure in her Amherst home life. Most similar of all the Dickinsons to Emily in temperament (though least similar in taste and intellect), Austin’s adulterous personal life would form the unlikely impetus that gradually forced Dickinson’s poems into public prominence.
    Dickinson’s invincibly sedentary love of home is, from our modern standpoint, rather pathetic. Her letters from Mount Holyoke (which she left after three terms) ache with sonorous longing for Amherst. When she arrived back home, she wrote: “Never did Amherst look more lovely to me & gratitude rose in my heart to God, for granting me such a safe return.” (Mount Holyoke is ten miles from Amherst.) Within a few years of Dickinson’s homecoming, Austin would begin a relationship with Susan Gilbert, whom he would eventually marry. Recently, scholarly eyebrows have raised at Susan and Emily’s relationship. Susan exchanged with Dickinson many letters, some of which are strikingly erotic. But like much of Dickinson’s life, these are speculative matters. For the next several decades, Dickinson did little but write letters and poems, very occasionally traveling, with her younger sister, Lavinia, to Washington and Philadelphia, among other far-flung locales. Vinnie, as Lavinia
was known, was utterly unlike her sister. Dickinson called Vinnie her “Soldier & Angel,” and Vinnie responded with a devotion that would not abate in the coming unpleasantness.
    In 1881, a brilliant young woman named Mabel Todd moved to Amherst with her professor husband. Austin and Susan immediately welcomed the Todds into their Amherst salon, and an open-secret affair between Austin and Todd began. Despite her great intellectual gifts, Todd came to Amherst very much untouched clay. Her literary aspirations to become a novelist made her uniquely susceptible to the legends already shrouding Austin’s increasingly sequestered sister. Two months after arriving in Amherst, she wrote: “I must tell you about the character of Amherst ... a lady whom the people call the Myth .” Within a year, Todd and Dickinson would be exchanging lengthy missives, flowers, and