Mabel Loomis Todd

To the extent she’s remembered in the 21st century, Mabel Loomis Todd is most known for her associations with members of the Dickinson family of Amherst, Massachusetts: as one of Emily Dickinson’s first editors, or for her long-term extra-marital relationship with Emily’s older brother, William Austin Dickinson. Yet Mabel Loomis Todd was much more than just Emily’s editor or Austin’s lover.

Mabel was a gifted musician who studied both piano and voice at the New England Conservatory; a talented painter in many media who at one point studied painting with Hudson River landscape artist Martin Johnson Heade; a writer who published books, articles, poetry and fiction; and a woman extremely engaged in civic endeavors in both Amherst, where she lived for thirty-five years and Florida; and an ardent environmentalist who purchased tracts of land to save them from development and was one of the people responsible for the development of the Everglades National Park.

Married to astronomer and Amherst College professor David Peck Todd in 1879, Mabel traveled the world on a series of eclipse expeditions, going to Japan, the Dutch East Indies (modern day Indonesia), Tripoli and many other destinations. In all she visited more than 30 countries on five continents, going to locations few Westerners of her day had seen, and fewer women, still.

Mabel’s lengthy relationship with Austin Dickinson, brother of the poet, upended both of their families and set up a long-running dispute between their families. In addition to the impact on her personal life, the relationship also introduced Mabel to the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Partnering with eminent abolitionist, author and literary advocate Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mabel set about deciphering, editing, and organizing Emily’s poetry. Their editorial work has been much criticized by contemporary scholars, including but not limited to their assignment of titles to poems that originally bore none. The first collection of poetry came out in 1890, the second in 1891 and the third in 1896; Mabel also edited a two-volume set of Dickinson’s letters that was published in 1894. To publicize this poetry that differed so radically from contemporary Victorian conventions, Mabel launched on a series of lectures. Her considerable gift for public speaking and the variety of her topics made her a rare female public intellectual. At the height of her public speaking career she gave as many as sixty talks a year in locations across the United States, during which time she was anointed “the dean of American female lecturers” by one newspaper editor.

Mabel died suddenly in 1932 on Hog Island, a place she dearly loved and had saved from logging, and was buried in Wildwood Cemetery in Amherst – beside her husband David and up the hill but just out of sight of Austin Dickinson’s plot.