Margaret Maher c.1845-1924
MARGARET MAHER, servant, was born in Kilusty, Co Tipperary, and emigrated circa 1865 with an older sister and several brothers to America. After her sister married Thomas Kelley (1848-1913) and settled in Amherst, Massachusetts, Maggie (as she was known) returned to Tipperary to bring her parents to America, who also settled in Amherst.
Maher worked for a family called Boltwood. After the Boltwood children left for school Maggie intended to follow her brother to California but was instead engaged in February 1869 by the Dickinsons, among the foremost Amherst families, and the most eccentric. Edward Dickinson was an authoritarian lawyer, his wife was a semi-invalid, and their eldest daughter, the poet Emily Dickinson, was a recluse who did not leave the house after 1866.
The year after Edward Dickinson’s death in 1874, his wife was paralysed by a stroke and needed constant care until her death in 1881. Maher stayed 30 years with the family and was loyal, hard-working, and equal to their eccentricities, slipping clandestine letters under the bedroom door to Emily and giving the six cats of the younger sister, Lavinia, their milk in separate saucers. She was rewarded by the solicitude of all the family, especially Emily – who wrote her amusing letters when she was sick with typhoid and gave her support after her brother’s death in 1881 – and by a number of wonderful descriptions in Dickinson’s correspondence: “Maggie, good and noisy, the north wind of the family” (Dickinson, Letters, 690); “Maggie, with us still, warm and wild and mighty” (ibid., 827). The evidence from Maher’s letters, misspelled, ungrammatical, but dignified and heartfelt, bears out the poet’s description. On her own directions for her funeral, Emily Dickinson was borne to her grave by the six Irishmen who had worked on her father’s grounds, including as chief pallbearer Maggie’s brother-in-law, Thomas Kelley. Maher remained with the family until the death of Lavinia (1899); her life after this is not recorded.
She died in America in 1924. Her correspondence is held in the Detroit public library and in Harvard. The story that Maggie saved Dickinson’s poems by refusing to burn them on her death, as she had requested, is probably apocryphal, but the poems were kept in Maggie’s trunk.
From the RIA Dictionary of Irish Biography. See dib.ie
