Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language (Revisiting New England: The New Regionalism)

By Aife Murray

In Maid as Muse, A fe Murray explodes the myth of the isolated genius and presents an intimate, densely realized story of joined lives between Emily Dickinson and her domestic servants. Part scholarly study, part detective story, part personal journey, Murray's book uncovers a world previously unknown: an influential world of Irish immigrant servants and an ethnically rich one of Yankee, English-immigrant, Native American, and African American maids and laborers, seamstresses and stablemen. Murray reveals how Margaret Maher and the other servants influenced the cultural outlook, fashion, artistic subject, and even poetic style of Emily Dickinson. Irish immigrant Maher becomes the lens to a larger story about artistic reciprocities and culture-making that has meaning way beyond Dickinson. This below-stairs, bottom-up portrait of the artist and her family not only injects themes of class and ethnic difference into the story but also imparts subtle details and intimacies that make the study of Emily Dickinson urgent once again. In the kitchen pantry where she spent a good portion of each day, the outside world came to Dickinson. The "invisible" kitchen was headquarters for people mostly lost from the public record--and it was her interactions with them that changed and helped define who Emily Dickinson was as a person and a poet.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1584656743
• ISBN13: 9781584656746
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: University of New Hampshire Press
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A brilliantly researched , well written book

Murray's generosity of spirit and writing is a must read for anyone interested in the unheard voices of New England during the 19th century. Certainly her research bore information that we can all learn from. She is the type of writer that I want to read more and more of. I excitedly look forward to reading her next book.

A brilliantly conceived, intimately readable literary history

MAID AS MUSE is a brilliantly conceived, expertly researched (with a scrupulous attention to a wealth of heretofore under-examined primary sources), and intimately readable literary history. For me, this is the best scholarly book for popular audiences that I have read in ten years. In fact, I am logging on now to purchase the book for two friends.

Maid as Muse Rocks!

Although Emily Dickinson rarely left her home after about the age of thirty, she lived in a bustling household that included her sister and several household servants, among them Margaret Maher, who worked for the family for decades. Only three incidents out of the many Murray elucidates suffice to show Maggie's importance to Dickinson and to her subsequent readers: Dickinson gave Maggie many of her poems to keep in her trunk, the famous daguerotype has come down to us from Maggie, who presumably had the only copy, and Maggie worked for Mabel Loomis Todd for free as Mabel edited Dickinson's poems. Part of a large Irish family, Maggie herself, independent of the Dickinson family, comes to life in this well researched and vividly written book. It is am important book on Dickinson and on the social history of the time.