Photo courtesy of Mike Medeiros
Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, Jane Wald
BY MIMI HUCKINS ’21
On the third floor of a historic house in Amherst, Massachusetts, sits Jane Wald, the executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum. She wears a cream sweater with a crisp blue vest, her glasses carefully balanced on her nose. She appears neat, serious, yet welcoming. In a quaint office overlooking Amherst’s fall foliage, Wald is able to admire the same landscape that one of the most famous American poets of the 19th century viewed daily for the majority of her life.
The office is anything but bare, with piles of papers and stacks of books on her desk and more filling shelves along the walls. Wald stands up, pulls out a particular book and begins to read “I felt my life with both my hands” by Emily Dickinson.
Wald said that she loves the poem because of its “profound statement about internal self-knowledge.” It is “currently,” she said, her “favorite Dickinson poem.” With her vast knowledge of Emily Dickinson’s 1,800 poems, no single one remains her true favorite for long. As the head of the Emily Dickinson Museum, Wald is exactly where she wants to be.
Wald grew up in Gainesville, Florida.
“My parents,” Wald recalled, “both had personal interests in history and historical subjects, partly in the history of their families.”
From a young age, Wald became interested in the subject when her family would tell stories of previous generations. These strong ties to family genealogy allowed Wald to connect to the subject in a “personal way.”
Although history was often at the forefront of her mind, Emily Dickinson was not.
“I was aware of Emily Dickinson, but she wasn’t really a focus of mine until I came to be interested in the Homestead and the Evergreens before joining the staff there,” Wald said.
The Emily Dickinson Museum is comprised of two houses, the Homestead and the Evergreens. The Homestead is where the poet famously lived for most of her life until her death, while the Evergreens, right next door, is where her brother’s family resided. Wald’s office is in the Homestead.
Wald’s journey took her from Gainesville to study history at Bryn Mawr, William and Mary and eventually Princeton.
“I went to college in Pennsylvania, then Virginia, graduate school in New Jersey and kind of kept moving up the eastern seaboard,” Wald said, but admitted, “the real reason I came [to Amherst] was that my husband had a job out of graduate school teaching History at Hampshire College. It was supposed to be a two-year visiting position and here he is, 33 years later, still at Hampshire.”
Similarly, Wald has also spent many years at the Emily Dickinson Museum. Her journey to executive director began before the Emily Dickinson Museum was even a single entity: it was the Homestead, owned by Amherst College, and the Evergreens, owned by a private family. Having an interest in the historical side of the Dickinson family, she started working at the Evergreens, until Amherst College gained ownership of both homes and the museum was created.
“I was one of two full-time employees at the time,” Wald said. “It was a smaller place and a smaller operation at that time. That was 16 years ago that the Emily Dickinson Museum was formed, so I’ve been here since then.”
In 2006, Wald became the executive director of the museum. As Wald began to read deeply into both Dickinson’s poetry and letters, she found a love for her writing.
“I would say that I myself am not a poet, I’m not a creative writer, but I do find inspiration in her words and being able to connect her words with the place where they blossomed,” she said.
Wald chuckled at the notion of having an intense spiritual connection with the deceased poet like some other visitors claim to have.
“I appreciate having such a sort of close and inside view of where she lived and it probably does help me in reading about her life and about what others have to say about Emily Dickinson,” Wald said. “I’m not sure that I can say that I have a unique connection to Emily Dickinson as some people experience when they’re here, if they’re in her bedroom or in the house or on the property. Some people’s experiences can be pretty profound. That’s not necessarily how I encounter it.”
Even those who dedicate their lives to studying Emily Dickinson do not know some of the most personal aspects of her life. Endless theories float around that cannot be confirmed or denied, many about Dickinson’s love interests and sexuality. Wald relates to this questioning.
“For those who are intensely interested in Emily Dickinson, it’s almost as if we want to put on her own life, to just know everything there is to know about her, and since that is not possible to do, we keep opening up new questions,” Wald said.
Despite not having a “profound” connection with the poet, Wald still sees the importance of experiencing the home the way Dickinson did. Much of the work Wald feels fondly about the restoration and preservation initiatives the museum continues to work on. Dickinson’s bedroom is one of the fully restored rooms, made to look and feel exactly how it did when Emily Dickinson herself lived there.
“I will say that, when I go into that room, that space feels different than the obviously 20th century parts of the house. There’s just a different feeling in that space,” Wald reflects.
The museum paid attention to every detail when restoring Dickinson’s bedroom. They managed to rescue small samples of the deteriorated original wallpaper and recreate the design to look as it did when she was alive. They also made an exact replica of her writing desk, as well as other details accurate to her life experience, like a gingerbread basket that sits by the window.
A self-declared “fan” of Wald, Mount Holyoke College professor and Emily Dickinson scholar Christopher Benfey marvels at her restoration work and creation of museum experience.
He said that the museum is completely different than it was before Wald was executive director and that “she’s had to make incredibly important decisions about the physical plant of the two houses.”
Wald constantly has to choose between each and every restoration effort and new addition to the Homestead and the Evergreens.
“Do we spend money on modernizing the electricity, or do we replace the wallpaper?” Benfey raised as an example. “Do we shore up the foundation, or do we put in pretty little lights?”
“I feel like she’s always made the smart, sensible decision, even when they are things I disagree with,” Benfey admitted. “I didn’t want them to cut down all of those hemlock trees that were around the whole outer perimeter. They cut them all down and replanted them, and I thought it looked terrible. Now they look great, and now it looks much more like it did in those days.”
It appears that Wald has to make a lot of tough decisions that not everyone will agree with. Much of this has to do with the financial aspect of her career. “A good deal of my job is fundraising — from individual donors and from government agencies. The Emily Dickinson Museum receives in kind services from Amherst College, but does not receive significant cash funding,” Wald said.
She continued to explain that the museum raises 85 percent of its operating budget independently; 30 percent is made up of admission costs and gift shop sales; 50 percent is fundraising; and additional money is earned through grants, various contributions and workshops hosted by the museum.
Wendy Kohler is a member of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Board of Governors and a friend of Wald. She has seen firsthand the reactions to Wald’s decisions.
“People have a very personal relationship with Emily Dickinson,” Kohler said. “There’s always going to be people who are going to be against your decision because it doesn’t fit with their view of who she is or how she should be represented. I think [Wald is] always respectful. I know she is.”
Benfey describes the museum’s relationship with Amherst College as very complicated.
“Amherst College is one of the richest schools in the world,” Benfey said. “They make the Homestead, which they own, raise their own money. The Emily Dickinson Museum has to do a ton of fundraising, and a lot of that is what [Wald] does too. She’s like a college president who has to spend an enormous amount of time raising money and finding donors, applying for grants.”
Living in Amherst for about 35 years, Wald knows the town well. “I think there is that sense within our community that Emily Dickinson is Amherst. It’s something that’s sort of woven into the town’s identity.”
She noted the lack of commercialization of the Emily Dickinson “brand” in Amherst, saying she believes that people in the town have a certain kind of respect for the poet, a respect that has motivated Wald for years in making decisions as to how Dickinson’s life will be presented to the public and what purpose the museum will have.
“I feel that Emily Dickinson is one of the most significant figures in literary history of any time or any place. Her material legacy is right here in this little Amherst community, and I have had the good fortune to become associated with this place,” Wald said. “I feel a deep sense of responsibility for stewarding this material legacy that she’s left, but also to advocate for her and her work in the world.”
Benfey recognizes this deep respect for Dickinson in Wald herself, saying, “[Wald] talks about Emily, as she calls her, in a very compelling, attractive, believable way — not like she’s condescending to Dickinson, not like she’s worshipping her, not like she’s her best friend, but in a very coherent way ... there’s a kind of respectful quality to it.”
In June, the museum received a bequest of $22 million from the late William McCall Vickery, an Amherst alum who served on the museum’s Board of Governors. This was the largest gift ever to be received by the Emily Dickinson Museum. “I think that has a lot to do with [Wald],” Benfey said. “She has built up a level of trust with these Amherst College dudes and they have felt she knows what she’s doing.” Kohler reflected this statement, saying Vickery believed in “[Wald]’s leadership. He was very clear about that.”
“[Wald]’s a serious person,” Benfey said. “She can run a lot of things. She runs this.”
To Benfey, this is what the Emily Dickinson Museum needs.
“I think she’s just really steady. I think she’s just a steady hand,” Benfey said.
Even with her perceived severity and steadiness when it comes to directing the museum, Wald’s heart remains in the dream of inspiring creativity in others.
“There is a certain kind of creativity or creative spark in every individual,” Wald said. “There’s some talent or skill, there’s something that every single person has to offer. If whatever that nugget is, if it can be sparked, that’s a way for every individual to find self-fulfillment.”