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Maid as muse : how servants changed Emily Dickinson's life and language / Aífe Murray.

Murray, Aife.
2009
811.4 D553Ym 2009
Available at 2nd (Main) Floor
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Title
Maid as muse : how servants changed Emily Dickinson's life and language / Aífe Murray.
Author
Murray, Aife.
ISBN
9781584656746 (cloth : alk. paper)
1584656743 (cloth : alk. paper)
Imprint
Durham, N.H. : University of New Hampshire Press ; Hanover [N.H.] : University Press of New England, c2009.
Language
English
Description
xi, 299 p. : ill., map ; 24 cm.
Call Number
811.4 D553Ym 2009
System Control No.
(OCoLC)276339409
(OCoLC)276339409
Summary
The author 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.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [275]-290) and index.
Formatted Contents Note
Introduction: Walking backward to something you know is there
Warm and wild and mighty
The 1850 housework compromise
Turning with a ferocity to a place she loved
Of pictures, the discloser
Emily Dickinson's Irish wake
She kept them in my trunk
There are things / We live among
Afterword: The broadest words are so narrow.
Series
Revisiting New England.
Record Appears in
Books > Print Books
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