Miss Emily

Did you choose to write about Emily Dickinson because of a personal connection to her work or because of a literary interest in her life and era?

I discovered that Emily Dickinson was a baker and began to bake her recipes (her coconut cake, her gingerbread). I had studied her work at school, choosing her for my Leaving Certificate (final exams) and always enjoyed her poetry. Baking her cakes sent me back to her poems and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if she had had an Irish maid?” It turned out she did have Irish maids, but I invented a new one so that I would not be working two real lives into fiction. I needed some room to imagine.

What research did you do to prepare for the novel? Which characters were drawn from Emily’s own life? Was there a specific person who was the inspiration for Ada?

There are a lot of books written about Emily’s life and poetry and I read many of them. I tend to research as I write, so I read them in tandem with writing Miss Emily.

When I had a first draft finished I traveled to Amherst in Massachusetts, Emily’s hometown, and visited her house (very moving) and grave (ditto); also her surviving white dress in the Amherst History Museum, the libraries that hold Dickinson artifacts, including a lock of Emily’s bright red hair. I also went to the Dickinson Room at Harvard University to view more possessions, including Emily’s original cherrywood desk. I took lots of photographs and kept a journal on the trip.

The research in Amherst and at Harvard, and from books, was a joy: I researched everything from the Dickinson family’s meals to their jewelry, from shell-less eggs to gonorrhea and breastfeeding in the nineteenth century.

I traveled back to Amherst again in August 2014 to attend my first meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society and will return in 2015. Once Emily gets a hold of you, she doesn’t want to let go.

All of Emily’s family as featured in Miss Emily are real people: Mr. and Mrs. Dickinson, Vinnie, Austin, Sue, Ned, Martha. Moody Cook and Mr. Cutler were also real people.

I made Ada a cousin of Maggie Maher, the most famous of the Dickinsons’ Irish maids, but Ada herself is an invention, as are Daniel and Patrick. 

Dickinson’s poems are loved for their ability to pack so much emotion into a handful of lines. What strengths are specific to poetry that can’t be captured in fiction, and vice versa?

By their nature, poems value brevity and concision, so the writer is aware that every word must carry its weight well, in terms of meaning and aptness; the words earn their place. Fiction, particularly novel writing, is an altogether flabbier affair—it has room for many characters, subplots, and development. It takes me about a year to write the first draft of a novel, so I don’t come to it in one mood—it is written over a long period of time and so there is a lot of opportunity to think about what I am doing.

There is beauty in both approaches: the short, succinct flash of the poem, as opposed to the long, workaday haul of the novel. I love both for the different hits I get from them.

Why did you decide to give each chapter descriptive titles, such as “Miss Ada Makes a Decision”?

I’ve always been charmed by E. M. Forster and his way of naming chapters, particularly in A Room with a View, so it’s an homage to him. Each chapter title works as a doorway into the action to follow; the title doesn’t give everything away but provides hints for the reader. 

There has been much discussion about the nature of Dickinson’s relationship with her sister-in-law Susan, whether it was friendship, romance, or perhaps a blend of both. Your portrayal of their interactions offers a subtle opinion. Can you discuss why you decided to present the women in this way?

When you read Emily’s letters to Sue, they are full of emotion, respect, and love. In one letter to her Emily says “my heart is full of you,” and that they need not talk because their eyes whisper for them. But her words can also be cryptic and demanding; I imagine friends were sometimes at a loss as to her exact meaning when she wrote to them.

As a friend Emily was quite demanding—she expected a lot of those close to her, probably because she chose just a select few for company and/or to correspond with. Did she love Sue? Yes, I believe she did. Was it more than platonic? Who can say? They certainly bickered like lovers at times and Emily said once she wanted to be buried with Sue at the end (she wasn’t).

Victorian female friendships were intense and passionate; maybe we just don’t fully understand, or empathize with, the nature of those friendships today. 

Baking together is a point of emotional connection for Ada and Emily. Why was being together in the kitchen such a safe space for them?

In a sense the kitchen was both of their domains—Ada’s as maid of all work, Emily’s as a place where she could be social on her own terms. Her bedroom was probably her true domain but the kitchen afforded her a place to be active in the household in a way that pleased her. She could also still be creative there—she loved to bake. She also often wrote in the kitchen, so it was clearly a very safe space for her.

While Ada and Emily come from vastly different backgrounds, they each challenge social expectations in their own way. In what other ways do you see them as similar?

They are both gregarious, full of fun and chatter—they both absolutely love to talk. They are also deep thinkers who enjoy mulling over every stray thought that occurs to them. They are noticers—nothing escapes them. And they both love natural things—plants, insects, the changing sky. 

The Irish experienced terrible discrimination as new immigrants to the United States, during Emily’s lifetime and well into the twentieth century. Cruel comments like those made by Austin Dickinson were, unfortunately, commonplace. What was the emotional impact for you as an Irishwoman in writing these scenes?

I have no problem in portraying the Irish in the way that they were perceived. The comments might have an element of truth, anyway, but they may say more about the people in the places where the Irish landed, also. I had a twinge of guilt, though, in making Austin Dickinson such an anti-Irish character. In reality, I think he was a much more fair-minded, generous, and genteel man than I have made him in my book, but I needed to serve the plot. I am very fond of him in reality!

If Emily Dickinson were alive today, what do you think she would be like? How would she react to the issues that face women in the twenty-first century?

Emily was a maverick—she took charge of her own mind and her own situation. She did not follow conventions in religion or in what was expected of her as a daughter of a well-to-do lawyer, that is, marriage and all it entails. Emily knew herself well and she knew what was best for her—she was confident and articulate and, like many writers, extremely happy in her own company. She wouldn’t be any different if she were alive today, I suppose.

I think Emily might enjoy the Internet and the knowledge it could bring and the virtual travel aspect of it. I imagine she would have balanced and interesting opinions on the issues that twenty-first-century women and girls face: body image, work pressures, the absurd notion of “having it all,” the cult of celebrity.

Emily never wanted fame; in her poem that begins “Fame is a bee” (available to read online) she basically says that celebrity is seductive, harmful, and fleeting. I doubt she would be seduced by it, even today.