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Samuel Ward, Julia Ward Howe’s brilliant and charismatic older brother,
Wrong Samuel Ward - Julie Ward Howe's brother was this Samuel Ward: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Ward_(lobbyist) while Margaret Fuller's Samuel Ward was this one:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Gray_Ward
The Harvard Computers came to be when Edward Charles Pickering, Bond’s successor, realized that his Scottish housemaid, Williamina Fleming, had better mathematical ability than the barely qualified men he had employed to analyze his observatory data. He hired Fleming as a part-time computer and was quickly swayed by her superior skill and work ethic, firing the men and enlisting a whole team of women to do the job, which they did formidably.
We say that photographs “immortalize,” and yet they do the very opposite. Every photograph razes us on our ephemeral temporality by forcing us to contemplate a moment—an unrepeatable fragment of existence—that once was and never again will be. To look at a daguerreotype is to confront the fact of your own mortality in the countenance of a person long dead, a person who once inhabited a fleeting moment—alive with dreams and desperations—just as you now inhabit this one. Rather than bringing us closer to immortality, photography humbled us before our mortal finitude.
How can a single person be both a stratospheric success and a failure bordering on the pathetic? Why do we seek narratives that move from less to more rather than from more to less, if the sum total is the same? Why do we consider it a failure when a long and loving relationship eventually grows troubled and ends, but celebrate romances bedeviled by innumerable obstacles that the lovers overcome before settling into a comfortable love? Why do we prefer the stories of lives that begin in poverty or obscurity and end in riches or fame to the stories of those that attain achievement early and end
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Now that I am supporting myself I feel so frightfully womanly that I cannot describe my venerable sensations, nor could you “realize” them, any more than dear Miss Elizabeth Peabody did the tree at Lenox, when she walked into it, and upon being asked about it, said, “Yes, I saw it, but I did not realize it.”
Hosmer’s masterpiece was first exhibited at London’s Royal Academy of Art, where women would not be admitted as students for another three years. The first woman would not be hired as a professor at the institution until more than a century and a half later, in 2011—two hundred forty-three years after the Academy’s founding.
The design Hosmer proposed for the statue was novel and daring: Lincoln surrounded by four colossal statues of black men symbolizing the different stages of African American history—auction, enslavement, freedom, citizenship—all encircled by thirty-six female figures representing the states of the Union.
Ambition is disfigured into arrogance when it becomes unmoored from self-awareness, from a realistic assessment of one’s competences.
She died a famous woman denying her wounds denying her wounds came from the same source as her power
“We are the only poets,” Emily told Susan, “and everyone else is prose.”
The concept of the “Music of the Spheres” is attributed to Pythagoras, but Dickinson is likely teasing Susan—a mathematician—with a joke about the “Pythagorean maxim” Herman Melville posited in the recently published Moby-Dick: “Avoid eating beans, which cause flatulence.” I am not above delighting in the fact that one of humanity’s greatest poets was not above making a fart joke to her beloved. What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover’s full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?
We never know we go—when we are going We jest and shut the door— Fate following behind us bolts it And we accost no more.
Beyond any human lifetime, and often even within it, what is recorded is what is remembered, the records gradually displacing the actuality of lived events. And what is recorded is a fraction of what is thought, felt, acted out, lived—a fraction at best edited by the very act of its selection, at worst warped by rationalization or fictionalized by a deliberate retelling of reality. The stories we tell about our own lives, to others but especially to ourselves, we tell in order to make our lives livable.
is possible that she had confided in him the intensity of her heartbreak, if not its source. “We tell a Hurt to cool it,” she would write in a poem.
Upon Austin’s death a decade later, David would count the funeral as the saddest day of his entire life. “My best friend died tonight, & I seem stranded….He touched and forwarded everything,” he would sorrow in his diary, then fetch from the family vault Austin’s love letters to read them to Mabel as she wept disconsolately.
Strangest marriage ever
Later, in her campaign to tarnish her rival’s reputation, Mabel would attribute it to Susan’s “unconquerable laziness.”
The audacity to talk shit on the wife of the man you're cheating with
(Mabel’s reputation was tarnished by the revelation, even though her spouse condoned the relationship. Austin’s was not, even though his spouse was the only victim of betrayal in the arrangement.)
Much as Mabel annoys me, this is some (unsurprisingly) sexist bullshit
Mabel’s hero-villain role in the Dickinson drama is a microcosm of the human predicament. Our inner multitudes cleave us into contradictions never as perfectly parted as Emily Dickinson’s hair in the daguerreotype that sealed her image. We are never one thing, our slumbering potentialities stirred into being by situations in which chance and choice conspire to make us the people we are said to have been.
Her life was lived—as every life is lived—not by Emily Dickinson, but by many Emily Dickinsons. Lavinia’s sister was different from Austin’s sister, different from Susan’s almost-lover, different from Higginson’s cracked correspondent, different from the woman who silently tended to the orchids in the glass chamber of her winter conservatory, different from the ghost who sent Mabel wine and verses from the bedroom above Beethoven. These are not costumes donned with artifice for different occasions—they are facets of a self, each illuminated when a particular beam hits at a particular angle. We
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It sounded as if the streets were running— And then—the streets stood still— Eclipse was all we could see at the Window And Awe—was all we could feel. By and by—the boldest stole out of his Covert To see if Time was there— Nature was in her Opal Apron— Mixing fresher Air.
The dawn of every love seems haloed by the sense—the beautiful illusion—of fatedness, as the lovers discover in elated disbelief the staggering number of things they have had in common since long before they met: the favorite poem, the esoteric obsession, the freckle on the same spot of the same thigh. They seem to have lived two strands of the same life, long ago unwreathed by some cruel chance and only just now entwined into wholeness. They seem to be thinking the same thoughts.
