Theodora V.W. Ward

Editing Emily

References to Theodora Van Wagenen Ward

Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia

WARD, THEODORA VAN WAGENEN (1890-1974) This granddaughter of Emily Dickinson's close friends Josiah and Elizabeth Holland spent thirty-five five years as a Dickinson scholar, both as an editor of the poem and letter manuscripts and as a biographer.

In 1951 Ward published a collection of Dickinson's correspondence with her grandparents, in which she worked to demonstrate how important the Hollands (particularly Elizabeth) were to Emily Dickinson and to redress what she believed was benign neglect of the significance of the couple's thirty-five-year friendship with the poet. She persuasively argued that her grandmother, in particular, was central to Dickinson's select circle of friends.

Ward's 1961 collection of biographical essays, The Capsule of the Mind, is noteworthy for her sensitivity to, and empathy for, the challenges, choices, and limitations life in nineteenth-century Amherst offered Emily Dickinson as a woman artist.

Most will remember her, however, as the person who assisted Thomas H. Johnson with the daunting task of collecting, dating, ordering, and editing the Harvard collections of Dickinson's Poems (1955) and Letters (1958).

Both of the Ward-authored appendixes to Poems have profoundly influenced Dickinson scholarship since 1955, particularly her illustrated essay "Characteristics of the Handwriting," an expansion and revision of her observations about the Holland letter manuscripts that traces and documents changes in Dickinson's handwriting from 1850 to her death in 1886. Together with study of the paper upon which Dickinson wrote her poems and letters, these physical details from the manuscripts were used to establish a chronology that, although tentative, has profoundly affected the ways in which subsequent critics have written about the development of Dickinson's style and the shape of her poetic career.

Stephanie A. Tingley

[Note: reformatted, asterisks to encyclopedia references removed]

RECOMMENDED: Stephanie A. Tingley. "The Contributions of Theodora Van Wagenen Ward." Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin 8, 1 (1996)

'far abroad on Summer Days'

"A Druidic Difference": Emily Dickinson and Shamanism

This poem, as well as numerous others such as Patterson discusses in the article I cite above, presents a persona whose gender is ambiguous. To suggest, as Theodora Ward does, citing Jung as her authority, that the "image of man in woman [. . .] represents the woman's mind" and that a "large proportion" of Dickinson's poems bare this out (70), is, to say the least, an oversimplification and a reduction of Jung's ideas.

Getting Nearer, Knowing Less: Reading Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts

"Mitchell also cites the counter argument of scholar Theodora Ward, who noted that the capriciously positioned dashes were used in both letters and poems and thus questioned the theory that the marks were a systematic guide for reading aloud."

Emily Dickinson Journal

Mrs. Holland's granddaughter, Theodora Van Wagenen Ward, published and presumably owned the Dickinson letters to the Hollands—many of which are mysteriously missing today (Ward Emily Dickinson's Letters). Ward was assistant editor to Thomas Johnson for his Dickinson publications in the 1950s, and Ward probably knew exactly who the Master figure was. In her book, Capsule of the Mind, Ward discussed and dismissed Wadsworth and Bowles. Then she suggested, "The possibility of one more correspondent must be considered in connection with the rough drafts of three highly emotional letters to an unnamed "Master" (151). Ward even said it might well be someone in the Civil War, but a person who was in Dickinson's life only a short time. Ward then cautioned, "It is not necessary to identify the man who stirred Emily so profoundly" (49).

Besides her grandmother, Elizabeth Holland, Ward also acknowledged two other couriers who addressed and delivered letters and packages for Dickinson: Luke Sweetser and Dickinson cousin and Main Street neighbor, George Montague (Ward, Capsule 135). Sweetser had been Clark's next-door neighbor and George Montague was Clark's treasurer at Mass. Agric. College when Clark was President.

Praise from T.H. Johnson

In a commentary, on the text of Johnson's Acknowledgements in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, I found this:

Finally, he pays especial gratitude to George Frisbie Whicher, Jay Leyda (who arranged the Amherst College Library/Special Collections' card catalog), and Theodora Van Wagenen Ward [who, as editorial assistant, "acted as counselor in all matters of plan and execution. . . " (xv)]. (An interesting side note is that Johnson frequently, although not in every case, refers to women in the acknowledgments section by their husband's name . . ..) [source]