Editing Emily: Players

Martha Dickinson Bianchi

Photo (of photo) by Jerome Liebling, The Dickinson's of Amherst

"Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi, whose great grandfather was a founder of this College, and whose grandfather and father were its treasurers for nearly sixty years; niece of that rare and original spirit, Emily Dickinson, whose poems you have brought into renewed and deserved admiration; yourself a biographer, novelist, and poet; it is both you and your family whom the College honors in conferring upon you the degree of Doctor of Letters."

Biographical Notes

Martha [Dickinson] married a shady Russian military officer, Alexander Bianchi, in 1903. She later separated from him in the wake of a scandal, although she did not divorce him until after her mother's death in 1913.

Martha was the last of the Dickinsons, living alone in the Evergreens until the 1920s, when Alfred Leete Hampson, to whom she bequeathed the house in 1943, moved in as her secretary. He married in 1947, and upon his death in 1952 the Evergreens passed to his widow, Mary.

Although she aspired to be a poet and short story writer, Martha eventually resigned herself to a role as her aunt Emily's biographer and, in rivalry with Mabel Loomis Todd, editor.

Writing/Editing

Martha Dickinson Bianchi published Susan's collection of her own manuscripts in 1914 in The Single Hound and in a 1915 Atlantic Monthly article. She rearranged Todd's Letters and added biographical accounts in her 1924 The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. Also in 1924 she combined the poems found in the three Todd-Higginson volumes with her own work and published The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. But this appellation proved too hasty: she subsequently found more manuscript material and released two further installments, Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (1929) and Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson (1935). Face to Face, an expanded biography combined with poetry and letters, was published in 1932. Bianchi and her co-editor, Alfred Leete Hampson, have been disparaged for what other editors call sloppy work, but Ralph Franklin admits it is "deserving of serious study" (Variorum 5) and Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart also treat her as an editor with a serious mission, giving her credit where other editors have not. [Source: emilydickinson.org]

Books

• 1914 in The Single Hound
• 1924 The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson
• 1924 The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
• 1929 Further Poems of Emily Dickinson*
• 1932 Face to Face
• 1935 Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson*

Martha Online

The complete poems of Emily Dickinson, with an introduction by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi -- Read the introduction

"The Worlds," a poem by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi, from Anthology of Massachusetts Poets (1922). William Stanley Braithwaite, ed.

Russian Lyrics, translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi at Project Gutenberg.

The text of Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Translations: Russian Lyrics and Cossack Songs (New York: Duffield, 1910) bears an acknowledgement to an unnamed friend, and Captain Bianchi probably made substantial contributions to this text, for none of Martha Dickinson's papers suggest that she understood Russian. This book is one of many that Martha Dickinson Bianchi published with the New York firm of Peter Duffield, including The Cuckoo Nest (1909), A Modern Prometheus (1910), A Cossack Lover (1911), The Sin of Angels (1912), Gabriella and Other Poems (1913), The Kiss of Apollo (1913), and The Point of View (1918). [Source: The Emily Dickinson Journal, "To Market: The Dickinson Copyright Wars" by Elizabeth Horan, n. 7]