These Fevered Days by Martha Ackmann

These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson
by Martha Ackmann
WW Norton, 2020

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” writes Emily Dickinson in one of her most widely read poems. Martha Ackmann attempts to heed this advice in These Fevered Days, her new biography of Dickinson told in ten distinct “moments” from the nineteenth-century poet’s famously-secluded life. These episodes—shaped more by lines from Dickinson’s correspondence than by particularly meaningful times in the poet’s life—include discussions of Emily’s deep connection to language and imagery, her considerations of religion, her relationships with other writers and editors, and the role of grief at the end of her life.

Perhaps the most vivid chapter in Ackmann’s book describes how Dickinson saved her work. Ackmann surmises that “when Emily surveyed the sea of papers around her, she knew she needed a better system of preserving her poems.” Dickinson, according to the biographer, “decided that if she wanted to be distinguished, she would have to do so on her own terms,” given the limitations placed on women in mid-nineteenth-century America. The poet carefully copied her poems onto cream-colored stationary, then sewed sets of sheets together with a needle and fine string—creating handwritten booklets later called fascicles. These booklets have become the definitive source for literary scholars who seek to publish Dickinson’s poetry using the author’s atypical style of capitalization and punctuation.

Although Ackmann’s previous books were both about the twentieth century, Emily Dickinson has been a lifelong interest. For decades, she taught a college course about Dickinson—one which met in a seminar room at the Emily Dickinson Museum in the poet’s hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts. Her research for those classes (and this book) included not only a review of personal correspondence and local newspapers but also visits to places important to the poet. Ackmann trod the path between Dickinson’s home and her brother’s house next door, recited Shakespeare in the attic just as Emily did, and even wrote sections of her biography at the desk where the poet had worked. Her engagement in Dickinson’s physical reality is echoed by the book’s cover design: a reference to the wallpaper in Emily’s bedroom. The greatest strength of These Fevered Days is Ackmann’s ability to convey with tangible immediacy the physical world of Amherst. Readers are drawn into the book partly because of its strong sense of place.

This immediacy is also the source of the book’s major flaw. Frequently, Ackmann’s interpretations are based less on written source material than on her belief that she can channel Emily’s spirit through her immersion in Dickinson’s world. She often writes as if she knows what the poet was thinking, based not on her academic research but on of her own knowledge of physical layout and a historical day’s weather. For example, Ackmann writes that “as [the poet] raised her eyes above the hemlock hedge, Emily watched—but this time she also waited.” How does Ackmann know Dickinson raised her eyes or watched anything? She provides no citation. Sometimes the imaginings are not just atmospheric but instead deal with important literary concerns. For example, she states that Emily Dickinson “wanted fame. The only question was how to achieve it.” Later, Ackmann acknowledges what appears to be conflicting evidence: that Dickinson not only kept her poems almost completely private but also left explicit word that all her writing should be burned following her death. Even when the biographer does provide citations, it is impossible for readers to evaluate the evidence since the letters are cited only by number, with no reference to their writers or recipients.

In addition to the author’s tendency to state her imaginings as if they were truth, Ackmann chooses not to engage with debates in the Dickinson scholarship. For example, although These Fevered Days does mention Dickinson’s sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, the author chooses not to discuss the close friendship between the two women. Using textual evidence, several current scholars have argued that their relationship was not only close but romantic and perhaps even sexual. Ackmann doesn’t just ignore the issue of their potential romantic or sexual relationship; she makes a choice to minimize their entire friendship. At the other extreme, Ackmann interprets Dickinson’s late-life correspondence with her father’s old friend Otis Judge as obviously romantic, although many contemporary scholars are more circumspect. “After Emily pledged her love, Otis Lord asked her to marry him, or seemed to,” writes Ackmann. Emily’s pledge of love is sincere, but it is not clearly romantic--at least no more clearly romantic than her letters to many other men and women. Nor is marriage the only way to interpret the proposal Otis Lord apparently made. Without more nuance, it is hard to accept this biography’s arguments.

Despite the intensely-readable prose, serious readers of Dickinson will be disappointed by Ackmann’s reticence to acknowledge both the complexity of scholarship and the limitations of extant evidence.

—Hannah Joyner is an independent historian living in Washington, D.C. Her work includes Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson and From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South. You can find her on BookTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.