Maid As Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life & Language

1. The Homestead, 280 Main Street
Margaret Maher worked as a maid in the Dickinson family home for over 30 years, 1869-1899. She was preceded by other servants, among them Margaret O'Brien, 1856-1865.

2. Kelley Square, Adjacent to RR Depot
Home to Margaret Maher (1841-1924), Tom Kelley (1832?-1920) and his wife Mary [Maher] Kelley (1825-1909), and their descendents until the 1940s. Two of the houses, bought from Edward Dickinson, were occupied by Tom and Mary and the Maher family. William Kelley, a son, later raised a family here. Maher and the Kelleys built a four-family house as Maher's residence and a boarding house for Irish immigrants. A barn, sheds, fruit trees, grapes, roses, and gardens also occupied the grounds of Kelley Square.

3. The Lamp Black Shop
Tom Kelley was replacing a roof and slipped during its re-construction, suffering the loss of an arm. For three months he was nursed around the clock by his wife and sister-in-law.

4. The Dell, 90 Spring Street
Home of David Todd and Mabel Loomis Todd (house stood opposite when they occupied it). Maher worked from 3-8 p.m. for months at a time, in the 1890s (in addition to her Homestead work), while Todd prepared Dickinson's poems for publication.

5. The Evergreens, 214 Main Street
Austin, Emily Dickinson's brother, made his family home here after 1856. Margaret Kelley, eldest child of Tom Kelley, worked as a servant here and Margaret Maher nursed the ill.

6. West Cemetery, Triangle Street
At her request, Dickinson's body was borne to the grave by Tom Kelley, chief pallbearer, and Dennis Cashman, Tom or Daniel Moynihan, Dennis Scannell, Stephen Sullivan and Pat Ward. All of them worked on the Dickinson grounds.

7. The Dickinson's Pleasant Street Home
From 1840-1855 the poet lived here with her family and without a permanent maid-of-all-work (on the present site of a gas station).

8. St. Bridget's Church (former), 308 North Pleasant Street
Named for the patron saint of Ireland, the first Catholic Church in Amherst opened its doors in March 1871. Margaret Maher and the Kelley family worshiped here (on the present site of the Cathedral Apartments).

9. St. Brigid's Church (current), North Pleasant Street.
This Romanesque style church was consecrated in 1926; after the deaths of Tom Kelley and Margaret Maher.

10. Lucius M. & Clarinda Boltwood, 62 North Prospect Street
In the 1860s Maher worked as their domestic servant here, and in Hartford, Connecticut and Washington D.C.

11. Boltwood Mansion, Boltwood Avenue
Maher also labored for Lucius and Fanny Boltwood, parents of Lucius M. (on present site of Amherst College's Converse Hall).

12. Amherst College
Tom Kelley was a night watchman for the College. Some of his descendents have also been employed here.

A startlingly original work establishing the impact of domestic servants on the life and writings of Emily Dickinson

It all began with a photograph. When author Aífe Murray gazed at the image of Emily Dickinson's Irish maid, Margaret Maher, she saw her own heritage mingled with that of the Belle of Amherst. Since that day Murray has been pursuing, in research, writing, and visual media, a largely unknown aspect in the life of one of the most studied and written about, yet oddly elusive, figures. Using fictional scenes to amplify her research findings, Murray explodes the myth of the isolated genius and presents an intimate, densely realized story of joined lives. Part scholarly study, part detective story, part personal journey, Aífe Murray's book will fundamentally alter perceptions of this "solitary" writer. Spurned on to learn more about this Irish maid, Murray eventually uncovers a world previously unknown: of brogued whispers, of shared breaths in the heat of the Homestead hearth, of lives and language shared. The author reconstructs not just an influential world of Irish immigrant servants but an ethnically-rich one of Yankee, English-immigrant, Native-American and African American maids and laborers, seamstresses and stablemen. Murray reveals how Margaret and the other servants influenced the cultural outlook, fashion, artistic subject, and even poetic style of Emily Dickinson. Signature figure Margaret Maher becomes the lens, a vehicle, to a larger story about artistic reciprocities and culture-making that has meaning way beyond Dickinson. This below-stairs, bottom-up portrait of the artist and her family not only injects themes of class and ethnic difference into the story but also imparts subtle details and intimacies that make the study of Emily Dickinson urgent once again. In the kitchen pantry where she spent a good portion of each day, the outside world came to Dickinson. The "invisible" kitchen was headquarters for people mostly lost from the public record and it was her interactions with them that changed and helped define who Emily Dickinson was as a person and a poet.

Available in winter 2010

She is sixteen. It is the winter of 1847. Each time she turns to her mother, she sees the yards of black bombazine, the reminder, if such was needed, that her grandfather Joel Norcross is dead these nine months. The dress fabric may have come from his Hampden mill. She's got the look of a kid with all the expectation of a girl on the verge, knowing she's to take her place but the hesitancy -- fearful, excited -- about doing so. It's the physical and heady experience of starting to like boys and knowing when they like her, of passionate feelings toward her girlfriends, of big ideas that are almost unfathomable, when deep examinations about electing a savior are nearly unbearable. It's the winter, as Emily wrote to a girlfriend, when so many hearts have given way to God.

There are unbridled passions that bubble up and spill over; the whispered confidences trundled in bed with her sister; the delight so it's almost painful of spying something rare on the forest floor; and the thrill when the mind lightning darts. Sixteen. The lip bitten just thinking of sleigh rides with certain parties who shall remain anonymous, the round of winter parties, the Lyceum lecture, and the spring coat mother's having done up for her so it would be good if Spring were to hurry up and arrive. (copyright 2007 Ai'fe Murray)

At 19 years of age, Emily Dickinson complained about being saddled with housework because it interfered with her social life and writing. She eventually pressured her parents into hiring a maid. Primarily Irish immigrant and African American maids staffed the kitchen. In the barn and gardens there were English and Irish immigrant, Yankee and Native- and African-American stablemen, gardeners, and laborers.