One day late in 1881, the young wife of a recently hired instructor at Amherst College wrote to her parents in Washington about her impressions of her new hometown. Among other things, she told them about a mysterious woman who was “the character of Amherst”:
It is a lady [she explained] whom the people call the Myth. She is a sister of Mr. [Austin] Dickinson [the college treasurer], and seems to be the climax of all the family oddity. She has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years, except once to see a new church, when she crept out at night, & viewed it by the moonlight. . . . Her sister, who was at Mrs. Dickinson’s party, invited me to come & sing to her mother sometime. . . . People tell me that the myth will hear every note—she will be near, but unseen. . . . Isn’t that like a book? So interesting.
No one knows the cause of her isolation, but of course there are dozens of reasons assigned.
The “myth,” of course, was none other than Miss Emily Dickinson, who at the time of the young lady’s gossipy missive was fifty years old, had never married, and had spent much of her life writing poems, hundreds of them, of which only a handful had been published. Even now, a century after her death (in 1886), critics and biographers, like her Amherst contemporaries, are unable
