Maid as Muse is 30% off in a sale that ends August 30.

Order direct from the publisher using coupon code DM121W

We’ll arrange a signing of your copy at an upcoming event so sign up on the MaM FB page

I’m off doing some summer reading

- Maira Kalman -

-Jim Goldberg’s Open See -

Making notes on what it stimulates.

Even writing some reviews.

When you finish Maid as Muse

You could help future readers by

Submitting your response…

(I’ll follow summer reads with

-the last Bronx grapes

-and first Macouns)

Is writing a book a function of a kind of book-chain-migration?

Maid as Muse came about because of a visit to my local public library.

I happened upon a Dickinson biography on the library shelves. Inside was a photograph of three servants. Seeing that image changed my life.

Writing Maid as Muse is the result of serendipity – of asking a question to which Richard Sewall’s biography of Emily Dickinson gave a first answer.

Would stumbling upon a copy of Maid as Muse at your library alter someone’s life? What book will come from the next serendipitous link?

Ask your local library to order Maid as Muse for the collection. See what happens…

I just visited the Eugene Public Library, in Oregon, and Librarian Scott Herron placed an order for Maid as Muse while we spoke!

A fall tour is in motion – my fall migration through the Midwest and Northwest – so be in touch if you want me to wax on Emily Dickinson & “the help” at your book club, superstore, library, museum, classroom etc.

“This is culture !!” exclaimed Alessandro, from Brasil, upon listening to Voice of America’s story about Maid as Muse.

Readers of Maid as Muse give 5 Star reviews:

“Brilliantly conceived…intimately readable….best scholarly book for popular audiences that I have read in ten years. In fact, I am logging on now to purchase the book for two friends.”

“Maggie herself, independent of the Dickinson family, comes to life in this well researched and vividly written book.”

“Why did it take so long for someone to write this book??”

“Almost everything that takes me away from my work are responsibilities that Emily was able to delegate to servants who in turn gave her daily life interesting nuances to write even more about.”

“This is an enormously rich book, impossible to summarize briefly, well worth exploring, not only by the many fans of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, but anyone interested in cultural history and the development of American society.”

“My own Master’s thesis was on the relationship between white children and black women as domestics in the South in fact, fiction and film (primarily 1950′s to 1980′s).  This topic is dear to me.  Yet I had never thought of the (now quite obvious) fact of the artistic influence that goes on in the h0me and of the role of “maid as muse. Thanks, Ms. Murray.”

Put your feet up this summer

& read some passages, articles, blogs, posts, reviews, endorsements

& get your very own copy.

“Her language is incredibly exciting, even now,” says writer Aife Murray in a Voice of America interview with Faiza El-Masry. “So, you can’t just say she was a 19th century writer. She is still sending literary shockwaves. Her language is that fresh, that exciting.”

“Before she had a maid, she was in there cooking and doing all of the baking,” Murray tells El-Masry. “When a maid was hired to permanently work in the kitchen, Dickinson actually remained in the kitchen to write.”

“Emily Dickinson isolated herself from her peers, the wealthy leading families of the town as she got older, but the poor community was in and out,” Murray points out. “The servants’ children were running her errands, taking her letters around the neighborhood. She was rewarding them with pieces of cake. The world came to her.”

“First of all, having a maid made it possible for her to write,” she says. “Her writing really jumps in a huge way when a permanent maid is in the kitchen. She goes from writing no poems to writing almost a poem a week. In terms of language changes, what really surprised me was how she enfolded some of that language into her writing” — pointing to the influence of the English spoken by immigrants from Ireland and England and of African Americans.

“Maid as Muse author Aife Murray says writing her book was a way for her to give credit where credit is due — to the unsung men and women whose language and culture enhanced the work of one of America’s best-loved poets.”

Depicted above are Dickinson laborer Henry Hawkins, a Native American, with his grand-daughter Helen Pettijohn.  (Photo appears with written permission of their descendants. To reach them for permission to reproduce this image, contact the Maid as Muse author)

Read more of Faiza El-Masry’s Voice of America interview and listen.

“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see -
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

Emily Dickinson, well-trained in the sciences, makes a visit to the University of California, San Francisco.

On Tuesday, June 29, at 3 pm in Nursing Bldg N225, Emily D arrives on the health sciences campus as the subject of a book talk: “Emily Dickinson, Science and Servants.”

This presentation is free and open to the public. The talk will be followed by a book signing.

Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit – Life!

News Flash: Just posted Voice of America article & podcast by Faiza El-Masry.

“Women’s varied struggles to shape their own lives are exemplified by three resolute Americans whose paths crisscrossed as they made their way through the patriarchy of nineteenth-century Massachusetts” writes novelist Peter Quinn, an eloquent chronicler of the Irish experience in America.

The stories of these three resolute Americans, as Quinn puts it, “are told in a trio of recent books that study the era’s intricate nexus of family, friendship, and class—a nexus these three women accepted and challenged, honored and altered in turn.” In the most recent (June 18) issue of Commonweal Quinn discusses:

• White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Brenda Wineapple)
  
• Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language (Aife Murray)
  
• Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller (Kim Nielsen)

Quinn closes his terrific piece by waxing about the importance of Margaret Maher , a maid to Emily Dickinson and the poet’s co-conspirator, as well as his speculation about a link between the impoverished family of teacher Anne Sullivan – pictured here as a child – with that of Emily Dickinson’s stableman and chosen pallbearer Stephen Sullivan:

“Margaret Maher stayed on in the Dickinson household for eight years after Emily Dickinson died, until 1894, then moved in with her sister and her husband, Tom Kelley, and their brood of eight children. Tom, who’d lost an arm in an industrial accident and worked on the Dickinson property, had been specified by Emily Dickinson as chief pallbearer at her funeral, along with five other Irish workers on the estate. Austin Dickinson had come to accept his sister’s eccentricities, but, public as a funeral was, this bordered on the embarrassing, and he asked four of his acquaintances from among Amherst’s respectable classes to serve as honorary pallbearers. Of the five Irishmen who did the actual hauling of the coffin, four were born in Ireland. The fifth, Stephen Sullivan, was born locally and raised by a widowed mother who supported six children as a laundry worker. It’s well within the realm of possibility that he was from the same Springfield-area Sullivan clan as Anne, and that his mother was among those who had felt unable to save Anne and her brother from Tewksbury.

“It would be a fitting circumstantial link among three women whose lives shared common themes, and whose efforts were graced with a similar sense of persistence and dedication. Nielsen is certain that rather than be recalled as a so-called miracle worker, Anne Sullivan would wish to be remembered as an intensely devoted teacher whose education, experience, and intuition allowed her to touch and open other lives. For their part, Maher and Dickinson, far less public in their lifetimes, left their mark on all our lives. More than any family member or acquaintance—more than Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who answered Dickinson’s poetry with praise but also with the desire “to lead her in the direction of rules and tradition”—it was Maggie Maher whom Emily Dickinson judged capable of the disobedience necessary to bring her work to the world. Maher did not disappoint. Her act of insubordination worked the miracle for which posterity is in debt, turning the private genius of her mistress’s poetry into a universal legacy.”

Adrienne Rich calls Maid as Muse “a work of re-visionary reading . . . the daring of Murray’s quest and the even-handed generosity of her spirit are matched by the vitality of her own prose.”

Sunday, June 13 at 1 pm Baker-Gardener-Poet Emily Dickinson was joined by the biographer of her maids and laborers in the nation’s capitol at Politics & Prose.

Emily Dickinson made one visit to DC when her legislator father represented Massachusetts.

Judah, Marcia, and other seamstresses & maids helped Emily and her sister and mother prepare for their early 1850s appearance in DC.

Long term maid, Margaret Maher, saw much of capitol life because she lived in DC prior to her Dickinson tenure. Her previous employer, Lucius Manlius Boltwood, joined the staff at the Library of Congress and Margaret Maher kept his growing family on track. That is, until poet-baker Emily D. wooed her to the Homestead kitchen.

Author Aife Murray introduced the women and men who made ED’s writing life possible and came to influence the poet’s glorious language. Not only that but she described Margaret Maher’s role in saving poems slated for destruction. This and more!

Aife – and ED’s gardeners, maids, laborers, and laundry workers – was joined by a wonderful crowd of thirty folks, with great questions, on Sunday, June 13 at 1 pm. P&P is at 5015 Connecticut Ave NW.

For those who couldn’t be at Politics & Prose, you may still order a signed copy shipped direct: 800-722-0790.

credit: Susan Karlins

She died – this was the way she died.

And when her breath was done

Took up her simple wardrobe

And started for the sun -

Her little figure at the gate

The Angels must testify,

Since I could never find her

Opon the mortal side.

+

Betty Murray

24 July 1920 – 31 May 2010

Margaret Maher, Margaret O’Brien, Betty Ann Brown Scott, Rosina Mack, Eliza Thompson, Mary Thompson, and Margaret Kelley did a lot more than push a broom.

They were “kitchen collaborators” with Emily Dickinson. These women shared the back recesses of the poet’s house, jointly undertaking the chores of dishwashing and baking, cooking and correcting seasonings.

These women exerted other influences on style and expression. As Aliah O’Neill rightly points out in her excellent article for the print and online editions of Irish America magazine, genius does not exist in a vacuum.

In a talk headlined “The Poet in the Kitchen” the Maid as Muse author will describe this and more. Join Aife at 9:30 AM on Friday, May 28, at the American Literature Association in San Francisco.