Mabel Loomis Todd

Mabel Loomis Todd or Mabel Loomis (November 10, 1856 – October 14, 1932) was an American editor and writer. She is remembered as the editor of posthumously published editions of Emily Dickinson's poetry and letters. She wrote several novels and books about her travels with her husband, astronomer David Peck Todd, as well as co-authoring a textbook on astronomy.

Todd's relationship to the Dickinson family was complicated. She had a lengthy affair with Emily's married older brother William Austin Dickinson. In preparing Emily's poetry for publication, which was also marred by family controversies, "she and co-editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson altered words, changed Dickinson's punctuation, capitalization and syntax to make her poetry closer to the conventions of 19th century verse. Perhaps most controversially, they gave names to poems that originally bore none (of Dickinson's close to 2000 known poems, perhaps only a dozen were given names by the poet, herself)."

She was born Mabel Loomis on November 10, 1856, the daughter of Mary Alden Wilder and Eben Jenks Loomis. Though her family traced its lineage to such New England luminaries as Priscilla Alden, they led financially difficult lives and Mabel spent much of her childhood in boardinghouses in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. She graduated from Georgetown Female Seminary in Washington, then studied music at the New England Conservatory in Boston.

She met astronomer David Peck Todd in 1877, and evidently knew he was a philanderer even before their wedding on March 5, 1879. Mrs. Todd had a passionate sexual nature and wrote freely about it. She wrote soon after her marriage: "Sweet communions. Oh joy! Oh! Bliss unutterable" and "A little Heaven just after dinner." The couple had one daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham (1880–1968).

They moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1881, where her husband had been offered a position as astronomy professor at his alma mater, Amherst College.

In 1892, Todd began a lengthy affair with Austin Dickinson, the (married) brother of Emily Dickinson; Austin was a prominent local lawyer who served as treasurer of Amherst College. They took private trips to the country together, spent time together in Boston, and wrote love letters to each other. Though they tried to conceal the affair, many people were aware of it. Todd and Dickinson were convinced that their love was above the morals of the day; Mabel once wrote that she thought things might have been different "had we been born one or two hundred years" later.

Todd had been concerned over moving to a small town, as her life might not be as exciting as it had been in cosmopolitan Washington or Boston, but she soon found ample outlets for her energies. She joined the church choir, was active in local theatrical performances, and her diaries are full of accounts of activities – "coaching parties to Mount Toby or Titan's Pier, sugaring-off parties, bowling and archery contests, horseback riding – one June morning she speaks of riding to Leverett before breakfast – and even tobogganing".

She accompanied her husband David when he traveled to Japan in 1887 to photograph the solar eclipse, and she was the first Western woman to walk up Mount Fuji. She accompanied David in his other efforts to photograph eclipses, traveling with him back to Japan in 1896, to Tripoli in 1900 and 1905, to the Dutch East Indies in 1901, to Chile in 1907, and to Russia in 1914. In all, Mabel Loomis Todd traveled to more than 30 countries on five continents. She wrote frequently about her travels, and often lectured on them, making her a rare public female intellectual in the late 19th century.