Emily Dickinson, at Home in Her ‘Full-Color Life’

AMHERST, Massachusetts – “Here is our Wizard Of Oz moment,” a guide said on a recent afternoon, before opening a door and stepping into the front foyer of the Emily Dickinson Museum.

It is not a comment you expect at the former family home of a poet cemented in the public imagination as the reclusive woman in white. But then, Dickinson is not who she used to be either.

Three years ago, the Apple TV+ show Dickinson gave her a 21st-century update – a fanciful post-modern mash-up that many scholars embraced as true to the poet’s radical spirit.

Now, the museum has reopened after a two-year, US$2.5 million (S$3.5 million) renovation that restores the once austere, sparsely decorated interiors to their richly furnished, almost Technicolor 1850s glory.

The spiffying-up – the latest stage of a long-range plan – includes hand-painted mouldings, recreated wallpaper and carpets exploding with quasi-psychedelic flowers. Throughout, there is a seamless blend of pieces from the Dickinson family and selections from a large trove of antique furnishings and props donated last year, in an unexpected twist, by the Apple show.

Few writers’ work is as intertwined with a place as Dickinson’s is with the yellow brick house at 280 Main Street, not far from Amherst College. She was born here in 1830, and she died here in 1886. And it was here where she wrote her more than 1,800 enigmatic, radically experimental poems – and where her sister, Lavinia Dickinson, discovered roughly 1,100 of them in a locked chest of drawers after her death, copied out neatly into hand-sewn books known as fascicles.

Even before it became a full-time museum in the 1990s, the house was a pilgrimage site, with visitors regularly knocking on the door. And in the 21st century, interest has continued to grow. Since 2001, visitorship has increased from about 7,000 people a year to about 15,000 before the pandemic, said the museum’s executive director Jane Wald.

The museum actually consists of two houses, joined together in 2003, following one of the more tangled and contentious sagas in American literary history, known in Dickinson circles as “the war between the houses”.

Across the lawn from the Homestead, as the main house is known, sits the Evergreens, an Italianate mansion built for her brother Austin Dickinson and his wife Susan. After Emily’s death, Lavinia gave her manuscripts to Susan to organise for publication. But when she took too long, they went to writer Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin’s mistress, who helped edit the first published collection of Dickinson’s poetry.

What followed was a complex, multigenerational feud over the fate of her manuscripts and other artefacts. The manuscripts ended up split between Amherst College and Harvard University, which today claims copyright over the text of all Dickinson’s poems, letters and manuscripts.

The Homestead was sold out of the family in 1916, and then bought in 1965 by Amherst College, which used it as faculty housing (with the stipulation that the faculty member’s spouse curate the house and welcome some visitors).

The Evergreens, meanwhile, was almost torn down, in accordance with the will of Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson. When Martha died in 1943, it passed to her friend Alfred Hampson, and then to his widow Mary, who lived there until 1988. Amherst acquired the house in 2003, after a court ruling spared it from the wrecking ball.

Today, the Evergreens – currently closed for repairs – remains a decrepit time capsule. The Homestead, by contrast, looks shelter-magazine ready.

The house is presented as it might have looked in 1855, when the Dickinsons moved back in following a period of financial hardship, and when Emily, then 25, began her most productive period. It is also furnished with Dickinson’s poetry. Throughout the rooms are facsimiles of Dickinson’s manuscripts, including poems embedded in letters, written on envelopes and scraps.

Her rose-wallpapered bedroom houses a dressmaker’s dummy wearing a reproduction of one of her famous white dresses. A reproduction of her writing desk – the original is at Harvard – sits at the west-facing window.

The crowds that still flock to Amherst, Ms Wald said, show how much the voice of this radical 19th-century writer still calls forward.

She said she hoped the house offered each visitor a way into poetry, and “to tapping their own creativity.” “Because that’s what Emily Dickinson did,” she said. “She found a voice inside herself.” NYTIMES