Miss Emily Read online

  Praise for

  Miss Emily

  “A jewel of a novel, Miss Emily by Nuala O’Connor is a fascinating, heartfelt, and captivating glimpse into the mind and heart of Emily Dickinson, one of America’s most beloved poets, interwoven with the story of her spirited, witty, and devoted Irish maid, Ada. With its luminous prose and sympathetic, realistically drawn characters, you will feel yourself irresistibly drawn into Emily’s and Ada’s private worlds with every turn of the page.”

  —Syrie James, bestselling author of Jane Austen’s First Love and The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen

  “This beautifully crafted biographical novel vividly evokes Emily Dickinson and her world: her obsessive solitude, her sensual relationship with her sister-in-law, her conflicted relationship with her brother, and, most central, her companionable friendship with Ada, a spunky and superstitious Irish maid. Alternating between the stories of Emily and Ada, the novel brims with the charming details of their domestic life, the unfolding of a sweet romance, yet also, ultimately, brings to light the tragic effects of a violent reality that most often goes unmentioned, even today. This is an intensely engaging, emotional, and important story, exquisitely rendered. Brilliant!”

  —Sandra Gulland, author of the internationally bestselling Josephine B. Trilogy

  “Like a Dickinson poem, Miss Emily seems at first a simple story of friendship, but gradually reveals itself as a profound meditation on the human condition. O’Connor accomplishes this unfolding, just as Dickinson did, with her exquisite use of language. I lost myself in the beautiful detail of 1860s Amherst, a cast of characters that leapt off the page with life, and the constant reminder that words, properly wielded, can transcend time, transmit love, and, above all, inspire hope.”

  —Charlie Lovett, New York Times bestselling author of The Bookman’s Tale

  “Miss Emily presents its readers with a version of Emily Dickinson for the twenty-first century: an intensely private and reclusive woman who was as determined to live according to her own idiosyncratic rules as she was to engage on her own terms with the world outside her Amherst home. In the spirit of her beloved Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot, this fictionalized Dickinson crosses class, national, and religious lines to reach out to her Irish maid Ada with compassion, empathy, and humanity. In eloquent prose, O’Connor has depicted a life-changing encounter between two very different women that celebrates their complexity, passion, and strength.”

  —Dr. Paraic Finnerty, professor of American literature, University of Portsmouth, and author of Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare

  “The structure of the book is reminiscent of one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, a lyrical dialogue between two distinct voices. Ada and Emily are divided by class, ethnicity, learning, circumstance; but a deep empathy and shared humanity unite them as women. This is a bittersweet story of repressed passion, thwarted opportunity, and the selflessness that is the essence of love.”

  —Stephanie Barron, bestselling author of the Being A Jane Austen Mystery series

  “An absorbing and provocative take on the inner life of a brilliant poet and her increasingly shrinking universe. The Dickinson household of Amherst, Massachusetts, is complex and very odd indeed and the tension builds toward shocking consequences for all involved. Nuala O’Connor’s prose skillfully and lyrically creates Emily Dickinson’s voice and that of her young Irish housekeeper, who chronicles the poet’s harrowing struggle to find the freedom to write while living a cloistered life at home. A novel you won’t want to put down.”

  —Jennifer Kaufman and Karen Mack, authors of Freud’s Mistress

  “Miss Emily is an intricate, intimate novel that, in its careful attention to language, pays homage to our most American poet’s extraordinary work. There are references to that work, rewards to true Dickinson aficionados, secreted in O’Connor’s prose, but this novel achieves a broader aim too: it tells a story of friendship that keeps us turning the pages.”

  — Kelly O’Connor McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott and The Island of Doves

  “Secrets will always out. In the same way that Emily Dickenson’s poems were once the best-kept secret in Massachusetts, Nuala O’Connor’s luminous prose has long been one of Ireland’s most treasured literary secrets. Now, through her superb evocation of nineteenth-century Amherst, an international audience is likely to be held rapt by the sparse lyricism and exactitude of O’Connor’s writing. Through a fusion of historical ventriloquism and imaginative dexterity, O’Connor vividly conjures up—in the real-life Emily Dickenson and the fictional Ada Concannon—two equally unforgettable characters who pulsate with life in this study of the slowly blossoming friendship between a delicate literary recluse and a young Irish emigrant eager to embrace the new world around her.”

  —Dermot Bolger, playwright, and author of The Journey Home and The Venice Suite

  “An original portrayal of Emily Dickinson seen here not just as a lover of words but as a heroine and friend to a plucky Irish maid who casts a new and sympathetic light on the Belle of Amherst.”

  —Sheila Kohler, author of Becoming Jane Eyre

  “Nuala O’Connor casts a keen, compassionate eye below the veneer of domesticity to illuminate the passion, pain, and life force behind the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Quietly elegant and moving, poignantly humane, Miss Emily is a rare gift.”

  —Ania Szado, author of Studio Saint-Ex

  A PENGUIN BOOK

  Miss Emily

  NUALA O’CONNOR is a well-regarded short-story writer and novelist in her native Ireland, writing under the name Nuala Ní Chonchúir, and has won many fiction awards, including RTÉ radio’s Francis MacManus Award, the Cúirt New Writing Prize, the Jane Geske Award, the inaugural Jonathan Swift Award, and the Cecil Day Lewis Award, among others. Her short story “Peach” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she was shortlisted for the European Prize for Literature for her short story collection Nude. She was born in Dublin in 1970 and lives in East Galway with her husband and three children.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Nuala Ní Chonchúir

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Excerpts from “God gave a loaf to every bird,” “I cannot live with you,” “It sifts from leaden sieves,” “Rearrange a ‘wife’s’ affection,” and “The sun and fog contested” reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  ISBN 978-0-698-18221-9

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design: Olga Grlic

  Cover photograph: Lee Avison/Arcangel Images

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for Nuala O'Connor

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedicatio
n

  Epigraph

  Miss Emily Dickinson Demands a New Maid

  Miss Ada Concannon Is Banished to the Scullery

  Miss Emily Surveys Amherst

  Miss Ada Leaves Ireland for the New World

  Miss Emily Hides in the Garden

  Miss Ada Arrives in Amherst, Massachusetts

  Miss Emily’s Father Pleases Her

  Miss Ada Makes an Early Success

  Miss Emily Dickinson Finds a New Companion in the Kitchen

  Miss Ada Is Upset by a Visitor to the Homestead

  Miss Emily Takes to Her Bed

  Miss Ada’s Head Is Turned

  Miss Emily Intervenes in a Family Matter

  Miss Ada Is Laid Low by Grief

  Miss Emily Welcomes Miss Martha Dickinson to the Family

  Miss Ada Walks Out with a Man

  Miss Emily and Miss Ada Celebrate Birthdays

  Miss Ada and Mr. Daniel Byrne Are Found Out

  Miss Emily Welcomes the Tenth of December

  Miss Ada Goes to Mass with Daniel

  Miss Emily Refuses an Invitation

  Miss Ada Takes a Ride on a Buckboard

  Miss Emily Turns to White

  Miss Ada Receives the Gift of a Fish

  Miss Emily Takes the Path Between the Houses

  Miss Ada Has a Visitor

  Miss Emily Sits for a New Daguerreotype

  Miss Ada Keeps a Secret from Daniel

  Miss Emily Ponders Her Brother

  Miss Ada Goes to Boston and Chicopee

  Miss Emily Grieves Her Brother

  Miss Ada Makes a Decision

  Miss Emily Confronts Mr. Austin

  Miss Ada Has an Encounter in Cutler’s Store

  Miss Emily Defends a Friend

  Miss Ada Makes a Confession

  Miss Emily Leaves the House

  Miss Ada Accepts Mr. Austin’s Help

  Miss Emily Says Farewell

  Miss Ada Concannon Returns

  Acknowledgments

  For Emily, for poetry

  She was not daily bread, she was star dust.

  —MARTHA DICKINSON BIANCHI, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson

  Miss Emily Dickinson

  Demands a New Maid

  JULY AND THERE IS CRISIS. FATHER THROWS DOWN HIS CUTLERY and says he will not eat one more burnt potato.

  “And I will not baste another seam,” I say, glancing at Mother.

  “Margaret O’Brien is all but irreplaceable,” Mother says, taking a sip of currant wine. “And there are only four of us, with Austin gone. We are a small household. Yes, Margaret may be missed, but we will manage.”

  I think of Margaret, snug now in her marital chambers with her beloved Mr. Lawler, a competent mother to his four orphans. The Lawler house no doubt gleams all around them, and beautifully cooked potatoes steam on their dinner plates. I am silenced by Margaret’s defection. Because she toils no more here, I must toil. Am I put out? Yes, I am. Am I anguished? I find that I am.

  “Some of us miss Margaret O’Brien dreadfully,” Father says.

  “Housework is regularizing, Edward.”

  I stare at Mother. I do not wish to be regularized. Or regular. My desire is to be free to pursue the things that please me. And why say it to Father anyway? He is only required to enjoy the spoils of others’ labor.

  “Well, replace the irreplaceable Margaret we must, my dear,” he says. “Emily is permanently floured to the elbows, Vinnie is never without a sweeping brush, and you are becoming too often ill from the weight of the household. Even the hens refuse to perform their duty since we lost Margaret. I shall see about a replacement forthwith.”

  I smile around at them all, from Father to Mother to Vinnie. My sister winks at me above the head of the puss she dandles on her lap.

  “Do not look so triumphant, Emily,” Mother says.

  I change my facial expression to a more Mother-pleasing one but allow myself to feel exultant. I know that when Father decides on something, he applies himself to its execution with vigorous care, and I have privately wheedled, cajoled and begged him to right the situation. Father lives and loves ferociously, and, for me, there is little he will not do. We shall soon have our new maid-of-all-work. My shriven hands will look robust once more. No more hauling scuttles or trying, vainly, to get chicken and mushrooms and gravy to magic themselves ready at the same time. No more will I scrub, peel, milk, feed, wash, lift, scrape and polish. I will bake when the want overtakes me, not when Mother desires a rye loaf or her callers an apple pie. And I will be able to write anytime I please, for as long as I wish, not only in the dull snatches of time between this chore and the next.

  I could rise from the table and kiss Father, here and now. Instead I eat the meal before me, knowing that soon we will sample beautifully cooked potatoes again.

  Miss Ada Concannon

  Is Banished to the Scullery

  I LOWER MYSELF INTO THE LIFFEY, FIRST TO MY THIGHS AND then waist-high. It is not too cold; the June days have heated the river, and the water has held the warmth all night. I flop onto my back and push away from the bank with my toes. My underclothes bloom like seedpods. Rose stands at the water’s edge, guarding my dress and boots, the swamp stretching behind her. Her eyes are fixed to where I loll in the murky river; she is making sure, I suppose, that I am not about to slip from her life as I so often threaten to do.

  I look toward the swamp, then spin on my back so I can see our house, a few fields off. While I float on the water, the village of Tigoora stirs much the same as it does every day. In our house Daddy puts on his jacket and thinks, maybe, about his time on the shivering ocean waves. The baronet and his lady snooze on, no doubt, knowing that the live-ins toil already and the rest of us will arrive shortly. Light seeps upward, diluting the ashen sky. The small ferryboat rocks, waiting to take us across the river to the Big House to begin our work.

  “Ada, get out now,” Rose calls. “I can see the ferryman coming. And Daddy, too. He told you not to go in the river.”

  I wave to Rose and swim a few strokes on my back. My sister looks like she might weep, so I haul myself out and pull my dress over my soaked underthings. The cloth drags against my wet skin, and Rose tugs at my sleeves and skirt to fix them. I wipe mud from my feet with wads of grass and pull on my stockings and boots.

  “Look at your hair,” Rose says forlornly, catching the rope of it and squeezing out drops.

  “It’ll be hidden under my cap,” I say. “Don’t fret, Rose.”

  “Once more you stink of the Liffey, Ada.” Mrs. Rathcliffe, the housekeeper, watches while I put on my apron. “And your hair is a shambles. I told your father to warn you not to arrive in that state to this house. Did he speak to you?”

  “He did, ma’am.”

  “And?”

  “And I won’t do it again, ma’am.”

  “I cannot have you traipsing through the place like a muddy rat.”

  Cook joins us in the stillroom. “Lady Elizabeth is coming down this morning to do the menus. You’ll need to get her out of here.” Cook tosses her head in my direction.

  Mrs. Rathcliffe looks at me, and I am chastened by her stern face. “Ada, from today you will join your sister in the scullery.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you will not converse with each other. If I hear one speck of chatter or, God forbid, laughter from the scullery, I will be very, very cross. There will be consequences. Do you understand?”

  “I do.”

  I leave the stillroom and stand in the passageway. The scullery, I think. I have had my warnings, but I am taken aback. I am diligent in my duties in this house, and the scullery is a step down. They mean me to go backward through this life, it seems. What will the other girls say? And Mammy? Cook and Mrs. Rathcliffe continu
e to speak, thinking, I suppose, that I am already ensconced with Rose.

  “That Ada Concannon is a peculiarly restless girl,” Cook says.

  “Her father might do better finding her a husband.”

  “I’ll hand over a golden guinea to Concannon if he can find a husband for any of his girls. The men are all dead of the Hunger or gone on the boat. Good luck to him nabbing one man between the eight of them.”

  I hear the rustle of Mrs. Rathcliffe’s skirts, and I run along the passageway. Rose smiles when I enter the scullery, her cheeks already glistening from the steam. The room is small, and though Rose is, too, she seems to fill it. I put my finger to my lips.

  “I’m to work here with you,” I whisper. “We’re not allowed talk.”

  Rose grins. “That will hardly suit you, Ada.” She takes a dolly tub from its rack and readies it for soaking clothes.

  “What will I do, Rose?”

  She points to a hare that is stretched out in the cold-water sink. “That needs skinning.”

  I grab the hare by the ears and lay it out on a board. Using a small knife, I slit the animal behind the ear and stick my finger inside; I pull the fur off its back and go at the legs.

  “I’d rather be laying out the morning tea in the servants’ hall or blacking the grate in Lady Elizabeth’s parlor than doing this.”

  “Of course you would, Ada. But Daddy did warn you. You wouldn’t be told.”

  I throw the hare onto its belly and fillet the back, my knife skimming its backbone as I cut. “God Almighty, will I be stuck here forever?”

  “I’m stuck here. It does me no harm.”

  “But you’re content in yourself, Rose. You know what I’m like—restless as a pup.”

  “What’s Daddy going to say to you, Ada? And Mammy?” She puts a bundle of chemises into the tub. “Will you be paid the same as me now?”