Lecture on Dickinson and Higginson at Ventfort Hall
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The book’s author, Brenda Wineapple, will present her subjects, the elusive, original poet and the radical abolitionist, reformer and writer at Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum on Wednesday, August 26, at 4:00pm. The lecture, part of the museum’s 2009 Summer Lecture Series, will take place prior to a Victorian Tea when Wineapple will autograph copies of her book.
The speaker will reveal the extraordinary, delicate connection between these two wildly dissimilar personalities, giving us new insight into the correspondence between them, which lasted almost a quarter of a century, a correspondence that included nearly one hundred of Dickinson’s dazzling, unseen poems.
Higginson, in his dual role as friend and literary adviser, counseled her against publishing, suggesting that her poetry was too unconventional, defiant, and unpredictable. After Dickinson’s death, he himself co-edited the first editions of her poetry – changing her distinctive punctuation – and watched them become immediate bestsellers.
Dickinson and Higginson, she was 31 and he was 38 when they first corresponded, met face-to-face only twice (“I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much,” he said), but Wineapple will make clear that their friendship nonetheless throws a brilliant light both on secret world of the poet’s original imagination and into the century of letters that she and Higginson shared.
Wineapple teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Columbia University and The New School in New York City. She is the author of the award-winning Hawthorne: A Life and two other books, Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner, and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. The speaker’s essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in many publications, among them The American Scholar, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, Poetry and The Nation.
Tickets for the lecture and tea are $15 per person for nonmembers and $12 for members and may be purchased by calling Ventfort Hall at (413) 637-3206. The historic mansion is located at 104 Walker Street in Lenox.
This program is supported in part by grants from the Alford-Egremont Cultural Council, the Richmond Cultural Council, the Sandisfield Cultural Council, the Sheffield Cultural Council and the West Stockbridge Cultural Council, local agencies which are supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
An Official Project of Save America’s Treasures, Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum offers tours of the historic mansion, as well as lectures, concerts, teas, theater and other programs. This elegant Elizabethan-Revival Berkshire “cottage,” listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is open to the public year-around and is available for private rental. Built in 1893 for George and Sarah Morgan (sister of the financier, J. P. Morgan), Ventfort Hall has undergone substantial restoration, which continues.
