Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) is probably best known as the first editor of Emily Dickinson, and as the mistress for thirteen years of Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin. She was also a social leader, a clubwoman, a teacher, a musician, an artist, a writer, a lecturer, and a world traveler. Raised to identify herself as one of the New England cultural elite that claimed Emerson, Longfellow and Thoreau among its leading figures, Mabel self-consciously and lavishly detailed her life and her views in diaries, journals, letters, articles, lectures, books and notebooks.

Based on a richly rewarding collection of family papers now housed in the Yale University library, this interpretive biography follows the recurring issues of gender, language, and power throughout Mabel's life. These unifying topics are used to examine the cultural contradictions that led her, as an upper-middle-class woman who searched relentlessly for a vital public role, to look back on a life filled with success, yet still consider herself a failure. The first chapter establishes several generational patterns for viewing man and women that Mabel inherited from her mother and from her maternal grandmother. Chapter two explores the conflicts that she felt between her personal ambitions and her desire to marry. In chapter three, Mabel's experience of pregnancy and motherhood as major challenges to her emerging autonomy is discussed in some detail, as is her use of language, family, and ideology to reconcile herself to her new role. Chapter four, by studying Mabel's adulterous affair with Austin Dickinson and its effect on their spouses and on the social configuration of the town of Amherst, offers an analysis of Victorian sexuality that emphasizes its relationship to bourgeois family structure. Chapter five turns towards Mabel's public accomplishments, presenting a critique of "leisure" as an adequate category for understanding the significance of middle-class clubwomen's activities. Finally, chapters six and seven re-examine what most scholars--and, at the end of her life, Mabel herself--have considered her most important achievement: the first editing and publishing of Emily Dickinson's poetry and letters. This story is carried into the present generation of Dickinson scholarship in order to show the continuing struggle of women to break free from a hierarchical concept of subjectivity, a struggle which was the underlying theme of Mabel's life and the genius of Emily Dickinson's poetry.