Martha Ackmann Gets 'Into' Emily Dickinson's White Dress

At Paris Review, Martha Ackmann, author of the recently released These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson (W.W. Norton) writes about one aspect of Dickinson in particular: her white dress. "The first time the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson met Emily Dickinson, he remembered five details about the way she entered the room: her soft step, her breathless voice, her auburn hair, the two daylilies she offered him—and her exquisite white dress," writes Ackmann. From there: 

Dickinson’s white dress has become an emblem of the poet’s brilliance and mystery. When Mabel Loomis Todd moved to Dickinson’s hometown in the 1880s, she gushed about the poet’s attire. “I must tell you about the character of Amherst,” she wrote her parents. “It is a lady whom the people call the Myth … She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.” Jane Wald, the executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, believes Dickinson began dressing primarily in white in her thirties, and it was common knowledge around town that a white dress was the poet’s preferred article of clothing. Dickinson realized people gossiped about what she wore, and once joked with her cousins, “Won’t you tell ‘the public’ that at present I wear a brown dress with a cape if possible browner, and carry a parasol of the same!”

Only a few articles of Dickinson’s clothing have survived: a brown snood, a paisley wrap, a blue shawl, and a single white dress. The dress is unpretentious: cotton piqué, loose fitting with no waistline, featuring a box-pleated flounce at the bottom, twelve mother-of-pearl buttons, a flat collar, and a pocket on the right hip. More than fourteen yards of embroidered lace edge the collar, cuffs, pleats, and pocket. The surviving dress is typical of an inexpensive house garment of the late 1870s or early 1880s and was most likely worn during the last years of the poet’s life. Known as a “wrapper,” it was casual clothing for home and not for social occasions. Stitches indicate it was made on a sewing machine with some handwork. Comfortable and easy to clean, it did not require a corset.

Read on at Paris Review.