Starred review from July 23, 2001
Making perceptive use of feminist scholarship of the past three decades, the firsthand reports of Dickinson's intimates and careful readings of her lyrics and letters, former University of Kansas English professor Habegger creates a newly complex portrait of the poet's life (1830-86) and greatly enhances our understanding of her art. As in The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr.,
Habegger analyzes his subject's experiences from a modern perspective without obscuring the very different ways in which she herself perceived them. His greatest achievement is a nuanced depiction of how Dickinson transformed the limits placed on her into choices that enabled her poetry. Kept close to home in Amherst, Mass., by her authoritarian father, she chose to become a recluse and avoid altogether the social duties laid on middle-class women. Painfully rejected more than once as a young woman because of her extreme emotional neediness, she assumed a "childish" air that allowed her far more freedom of expression than that accorded New England's adults. "The blessing and the wound became one and the same," writes Habegger. "What that seems to mean for us is that her great genius is not to be distinguished from her madness." Habegger also gives full attention to the impact of the religious revival that swept New England in Dickinson's youth, reminding us of how tough young Emily had to resist intense pressure to declare herself "saved." Habegger rejects the traditional view that Dickinson's work and life were static; "her poetry shows a striking and dramatic evolution," he declares, and his immensely satisfying narrative makes the largely interior struggles she conducted over the course of 55 years just as dramatic. This is as good as literary biography gets.
June 1, 2001
Having assayed Henry James's father, Habegger takes on a tricky female: the elusive Emily.
Copyright 2001 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from September 1, 2001
It's hard to imagine how Richard Sewall's magnificent and elegantly written two-volume life of Dickinson (The Life of Emily Dickinson, LJ 11/1/74) can be surpassed. Wisely, Habegger (The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr.) concurs that Sewall's study remains the finest of the few biographies of the enigmatic New England poet. Even so, this new biography weaves newly available letters and other research notably the various drafts of the poetry gathered in R.W. Franklin's three-volume variorum edition of Dickinson's poems into a fascinating narrative of her life and development as a writer. Because of the uncertainty about the correct dates of her poems, many previous biographies, Sewall's included, viewed Dickinson as a poet who achieved the pinnacle of her creativity by the time she was 25. Using these newly available materials, Habegger ably traces Dickinson's evolution as a writer from her early childhood in the 1830s to her poetry of sex, isolation, and death in the 1860s and 1870s. He insightfully weaves Dickinson's poems into his narrative, showing clearly how her life and her poetry were bound together. In the end, however, Habegger reaches much the same conclusion as Sewall. No matter how much we reveal about her life and work, Dickinson will remain an enigma, just as she will remain, with Whitman, a seminal poet of the United States. Habegger's eloquent study deserves a place alongside Sewall's biography in all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/01.] Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA
Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from September 1, 2001
By weaving together a chronologically integrated reading of Emily Dickinson's poetry and correspondence, Habegger has written the most complete and satisfying biography to date of a poet long shrouded in myth and illusion. Scholarly breakthroughs in dating the poems make it possible to limn a pattern of development in Dickinson's poetry previously invisible to critics, just as a newly discovered printer's copy of her letters lays bare personal disclosures excised by her family. For the first time, readers share fully in the private struggle through which Dickinson learned how to transform emotional trauma into art. Careful research traces much of this trauma--and subsequent poetry--to an unreciprocated and agonizingly persistent passion for a charismatic Presbyterian minister. Habegger employs the latest resources not only to open new vistas but also to challenge stubborn misconceptions (that the Civil War scarcely touched Dickinson's imagination, for example, or that Dickinson was a lesbian). Yet for all he has to teach, Habegger finally warns his readers against expecting complete understanding of a poet who hid her poetry from her own family and who defied future generations with riddles and paradoxes. A superb study, too luminous to remain the exclusive property of specialists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)