In Maid as Muse, Aife Murray explodes the myth of the isolated genius and presents an intimate, densely realized story of joined lives between Emily Dickinson and her domestic servants. Part scholarly study, part detective story, part personal journey, Murray's book uncovers a world previously unknown: an influential world of Irish immigrant servants and an ethnically rich one of Yankee, English-immigrant, Native American, and African American maids and laborers, seamstresses and stablemen. Murray reveals how Margaret Maher and the other servants influenced the cultural outlook, fashion, artistic subject, and even poetic style of Emily Dickinson. Irish immigrant Maher becomes the lens to a larger story about artistic reciprocities and culture-making that has meaning way beyond Dickinson. This below-stairs, bottom-up portrait of the artist and her family not only injects themes of class and ethnic difference into the story but also imparts subtle details and intimacies that make the study of Emily Dickinson urgent once again. In the kitchen pantry where she spent a good portion of each day, the outside world came to Dickinson. The "invisible" kitchen was headquarters for people mostly lost from the public record--and it was her interactions with them that changed and helped define who Emily Dickinson was as a person and a poet.
A photograph changed Aífe Murray's life. She was standing in the library wondering how Emily Dickinson - a fine cook and baker - had time to write thousands of poems and letters. "Did she have hired help?" Aífe [pronounced ee-fah] pulled a popular Dickinson biography from the shelf and it opened at a photograph labeled "The Dickinson Domestics, about 1870." That's when the story grabbed her and wouldn't let go. Maid as Muse is a lively told tale
about women and men who have been unseen and undervalued are yet were instrumental in the making of our culture. Aífe makes connections others have forgotten or hidden.
Aífe has been in-residence at the Emily Dickinson Museum; she has helped the Museum add the servant story to their public interpretations of the poet's life. She created maps of the "servants' Amherst" and has led public walking tours of Amherst from the perspective of the Dickinson servants that were jointly narrated with present-day Dickinson Museum house cleaners, landscape gardeners, and servant descendants. Her artists' book, Art of Service, was a collaboration with the Dickinson Museum's house cleaners and gardeners. Aífe is engaged in a new project about erased stories and making maps to some true places that don't appear on any maps.
Adrienne Rich recently endorsed Maid as Muse:
"From reams of letters, poems, archival records, photographs, maps, newspaper articles, and interviews with descendants of Irish immigrant and African American laborers and servants, Aife Murray resurrects submerged lives and social realities in 19th century New England and beyond. Focusing on the Dickinson household through a new and revelatory lens, she makes a persuasive case that Dickinson's radical poetics were inflected by Irish and African American vernacular speech, even as she rejected standard literary and parlor diction. At center is not only the poet herself but Margaret Maher, alongside whom she worked as mistress and maid through her most productive years, and who actually preserved her poems.
This is a work of re-visionary reading and hands-on research. The daring of Murray's quest and the even-handed generosity of her spirit are matched by the vitality of her own prose.
Find more about Maid as Muse: http://maidasmuse.com/
author photo: Jim Goldberg - Magnum
