The Best of Connie Willis

Afterword for “The Soul Selects Her Own Society”

People are always surprised and disturbed by Emily Dickinson’s “reclusive” lifestyle and come up with all sorts of theories to explain her staying in her room, doing her gardening at night, and vanishing upstairs whenever visitors came to call: depression, a skin condition that wouldn’t let her out in the sun, lupus, a love affair that ended badly and that she never got over, agoraphobia, epilepsy, etc.

I, however, find her behavior completely understandable. She lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, for God’s sake.

She had a mind that could connect buggy rides with death, books with sailing ships, and winter light with “the weight of cathedral tunes.” She could write lines like “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” and “Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell,” and “And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see.” She was funny, ironic, and very smart, and she was stuck in a small town where people’s top concerns were bread baking and antimacassar crocheting, where they liked poems that rhymed and had opinions on everything and everybody—and breathlessly repeated them to everybody else. “Did you hear what that Dickinson girl said?”

I see Amherst as sort of a cross between Avonlea (without Anne of Green Gables), Yonkers (without Dolly Levi), Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and River City, Iowa, a small all-American town where the entire populace consists of Mrs. Rachel Lynde, Horace Vandergelder, and Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn.

I’d have stayed in my room, too.