Writing About the Real Emily Dickinson in a Fictional Reality
I have admired Emily Dickinson since I was a teenager and writing the Emily Dickinson Mystery Series is truly a dream come true. However, when I came up with the concept for the series one of my biggest concerns was writing about real people.
(14 Tips for Writing Captivating Historical Mysteries.)
Emily had a close network of people in her life from her friends to her family to her beloved dog Carlo. I didn’t want to paint any real people in an inaccurate light, so I have worked diligently to stay true to what I believe the character of Emily was in the 1850s. I have also tried to stay true to the characters of her friends and family.
From my research, I found her father to be stern, her brother to be easily swayed, her mother to be quiet, and her sister to be the glue holding the family together. And I am certain that every last one of the Dickinsons knew Emily was different. She had the gift of seeing the world in a completely different light than was expected or even acceptable for young women in 1850s New England. Despite that, her family accepted her for who she was. This was likely the greatest gift Emily was ever given.
I try to stick to the true timeline of Emily’s life as much as possible to the point I will follow the calendar of that year and even look up the weather in Amherst, Massachusetts, on each day. Was it snowing? Then, it’s snowing in my novel. In the third novel, which I am writing now, it is snowing a lot because it’s set in January 1857 during the Cold Storm, which was 10 days of the worst winter weather New England has ever seen.
Some are surprised how active Emily is in my novels, but that is because she was active in society at the time the novels are set. I purposely chose to write about Dickinson in her 20s leading up to the period of the Civil War when she began to pull away from society, and I’m very careful that the places I send her in the series were places she actually was on those dates. For example, Emily was in Washington during February 1855. I wanted her to be in the capitol for part of her investigation in Because I Could Not Stop for Death, the first novel in the series, so I made sure it was February 1855.
However, I have taken liberties with the timeline too. The biggest example of that appears in the latest novel in the series, I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died. I wanted the novel to happen shortly after Emily’s brother Austin and her good friend Susan Gilbert marry but I also wanted to include Ralph Waldo Emerson because I love the idea of Emily interacting with the literary minds of her time. In this novel, Emerson comes to stay with Austin and Susan. This is true; he did stay with them. However, his first visit was in December 1857. For the timeline of my series it was much better for Emerson to visit the Dickinsons in the summer of 1856, so I just moved up his visit 18 months or so.
Check out Amanda Flower’s I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died here:
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The Emily that I write in this series is comprised from countless hours of research in which I read all of her poems (yes, I read them all), her letters that she sent to friends and family, and numerous biographies and articles about every aspect of her life. After my research, Emily, or my version of her, was full formed in my head. She was brilliant, daydreamy, loyal, unconventional, and brave.
I also knew she wasn’t a person whose voice I could accurately portray as the narrator. I’m a mystery author. My writing is driven by clues, red herrings, and logic… for the most part. I needed someone who could think like me to tell the story, so I knew that I needed to create a fictional character to be the voice of the series. It had to be someone who would be outside of the family and would learn about the family along with me.
I have always loved to read about the relationship between employers and servants in the 19th century. I find the juxtaposition and the tension in those relationships fascinating, so I made my narrator a servant, a person who would be a fixture in the Dickinson home and would be able to move freely about the house.
Margaret O’Brien was Emily Dickinson’s real maid at the time of the novel, but I couldn’t see her being Emily’s sidekick when solving murders. From what I gathered from my research, she was a practical woman and when she wasn’t working at the Dickinson home she was caring for her ill mother. In all actuality, she was far too busy to be solving crimes. Because Margaret wasn’t an option for me, I created Willa Noble. Willa is pure fiction and the narrator to the series in the same way John Watson is Sherlock Holmes’s narrator in the Holmes stories. By having Willa as the narrator, it gave me more freedom because Willa is not controlled by being a true historical figure.
I can never fully know what Emily’s relationships were with her family, including her sister-in-law Susan, but by creating Willa, she and I are able to come to a perspective of the family together.
There is no evidence that Emily Dickinson was involved in a murder investigation much less solved more than one like she has over my series. Even so, the Emily I know based on my understanding of the real person would have been more than capable to crack the case if so inclined.