From now until the end of May, visitors to the Morgan Library & Musuem in New York City will be able to stand in one room and see Emily Dickinson manuscripts and other pieces drawn from seven different collections. The exhibition is the culmination of a two-year collaboration between the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections and the curators of the Morgan Library.
Take a look at the information on the Morgan’s web site: http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/emily-dickinson
I want to use this blog post to thank several of the people who made this happen, starting with my collaborator on the Morgan side, Carolyn Vega, Assistant Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. I often say that I got to do the fun parts of the exhibition while Carolyn took charge of less-fun things, like arranging loans from several different repositories.
That very work is what makes this exhibition so special — many of the items brought together have never been exhibited together before, and will likely not come together again for quite a while. Chief among these items is the famous portrait of the Dickinson children, which has not left the Houghton Library at Harvard University since they acquired it in the 1940s.
Here is the portrait as it is now displayed in the gallery at the Morgan, against a backdrop of the reconstruction of the wallpaper from Dickinson’s bedroom. That wallpaper was only discovered as part of the reconstruction of Dickinson’s bedroom undertaken by the Emily Dickinson Museum in 2013. We are all very grateful to Houghton Library for lending this work, and to Jane Wald and the crew of the Emily Dickinson Museum for their support of this exhibition.
Other recently discovered Dickinson items include the portrait of two women, one of whom MAY be Emily Dickinson:
While this daguerreotype remains the private property of an anonymous collector, “Sam Carlo” was kind enough to place it on deposit at Amherst College and to allow us to include it in this exhibition. For the first time ever, visitors can see the portrait of Dickinson as a child (Houghton Library), the silhouette cut when she was 14, the lock of her hair, the authentic 1846 daguerreotype, and compare all of those likenesses to this recently discovered image.
Other lenders to the show are: the Emily Dickinson Museum, Mount Holyoke College, New York Public Library, and Boston Public Library. The Morgan’s own holdings of Dickinson manuscripts round out the total of seven institutions who contributed to making this show a success. Many thanks to all of them.
Another massive thank you goes out to Mark Edington, Director of the Amherst College Press, who valiantly managed the production of the exhibition catalogue: The Networked Recluse: The Connected World of Emily Dickinson. As with all of the products of the Amherst College Press, anyone with an internet connection can download the complete work as a PDF file. Copies of the printed book are currently available through the Morgan Library gift shop. Many thanks to Mark and to our contributors: Marta Werner, Susan Howe, and Richard Wilbur.
Last, and definitely not least, I must thank the staff of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections for their knowledge and support and patience. We have a lot to be proud of, and none of it could have happened without them.
I will end with a link to the first review of the exhibition which appeared in the New York Times on Friday, January 20 — the date the exhibition opened to the public. Pulitzer Prize winning critic Holland Cotter said many nice things about our work, for which we are all extremely grateful:
“I’m Nobody”? Not a chance, Emily Dickinson