Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language Book

If, as Adrienne Rich writes in "Vesuvius at Home" and as I fervently believe, Dickinson was aware of her talent and chose the conditions that would allow her nurture it, this book fleshes out a series of those choices. Brought up according to precepts of self-reliance and frugality, Dickinson preferred the warm, noisy kitchen at the back of the house--and the company of the servants there, particularly Irish-born maid Margaret Maher--to the guests in the parlors at the front even long after she was no longer called upon to do the bulk of the Homestead's cooking and baking. This book contains a number of ideas that are, potentially, paradigm-shifting: the notion that Dickinson's productivity was directly correlated with the relief from household duties that the presence of domestic servants provided (and, thus, that the expression of her voice was made possible by others whose voices remain silent); the idea that her diction and syntax are influenced by the patterns of Irish, Hiberno-English, and African American Vernacular English (e.g., often what sound like slant rhymes in Amherst dialect are exact rhymes when said in an Irish accent).

Yet this book remains as interesting for the avenues of scholarship it opens up than for the work it does on its own. I do like that many parts of this book read like a novel: I found myself invested in the Kelleys as characters, and I dreaded reading about certain turns I knew the plot would take because of how attached I became. But even more than that, I found myself wishing there were more hallmarks of a classical academic argument, and more of those arguments themselves: Murray points out fascinating directions for future study but does not do as much work as she could to illuminate her own claims--one often has to dig to find the arguments here. Murray doesn't as much close-read or analyze the poems as she plops them in as examples. The scrapbook, pastiche style (especially of the introduction), where photos aren't captioned and material is organized into brief, separately titled sections, allows Murray to make fragmented arguments without needing to knit them into a coherent whole. Additionally, the book has the thrust of a 1970s-era work of revisionary feminism (though, admittedly, it does vital emotional work), not of a 21st century academic tome, and though Murray does a great deal of investigative work in telling the servants' story, she does not cross-check the claims of many biographical accounts of Dickinson--accounts that she knows were written with the authors' personal motives at the fore, and accounts whose use plays into the Dickinson myth rather than mining it for facts. There are many other places where the argument is too speculative: for instance, though the idea that Dickinson produced more poetic work when she had less household work to do is persuasive, the numerical statistics Murray relies on--even after she acknowledges the estimate that less than 10% of Dickinson's letters survive--are not. The book is poorly copy-edited: all kinds of commas surface where they don't belong and are absent where they do. Though I'm grateful for this book and though it will undoubtedly be important in my future work, I couldn't help wishing, often, that there was even more here.