By Nick Grabbe

“Amherst is a college town, with the usual self-absorbed loftiness that makes such places as maddening as they are charming and livable.” – Madeleine Blais, “In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle” (1995)

I was scanning the large-print shelves at the Jones Library when I saw a title I wasn’t expecting: Amherst.

I checked out and read the 2015 novel, written by William Nicholson. It’s about a young British woman who comes to Amherst to research a screenplay about the love affair between Emily Dickinson’s married brother Austin and Mabel Loomis Todd (a fascinating woman, also married, who I’ve written about here).

The novel got me thinking about all the times Amherst has served as a setting for both fiction and non-fiction. I’ll focus here on two of these books, and their perceptions of Amherst, and provide a list of 15 others set here.

The British woman’s name is Alice (as in “Wonderland”) Dickinson (no relation). She begins an affair with a married, much older man (as did Mabel Loomis Todd) who has offered her a place to stay in his big house on Triangle Street. The chapters alternate between a reimagining of Mabel’s affair with Austin Dickinson and Alice’s parallel experience while visiting Amherst.

Nicholson sprinkles comments about Amherst amid his descriptions of the two affairs. To Mabel, Amherst “seemed to be plunged in a perpetual twilight” after her busy social life in Washington, D.C. “The faculty wives dressed in dark colors, ate their suppers at six o’clock, and did not care for playing cards or dancing,” Nicholson writes.

But after meeting Austin, Mabel says, “I think I shall like Amherst after all.”

Alice goes for a ride with the older man. On Strong Street, she spies “a collection of buildings that look like a light engineering factory but turn out to be an elementary school.” She finds Amherst to be “haunted by the ghost of Emily Dickinson” but also to have “a thriving Emily Dickinson industry.”

Upon visiting the Homestead, Alice obsesses about the room where Mabel and Austin “conducted” their affair (“The floor? The dining room table?”). Her tour guide, upon hearing that Alice is staying at Nick’s house, calls him a “legend” and says, “This is a small town, with too many people with time on their hands.”

There are references to the Amherst Inn, Rao’s, the Lord Jeffery Inn (now known as the Inn on Boltwood) and an extinct and expensive restaurant named Chez Albert.

Madeleine Blais’s book, In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle, is about the 1992-93 Amherst Regional High School girls basketball team that won the state championship. It includes numerous sly comments about Amherst, such as “It’s the last place in America where you can find people who still think ‘politically correct’ is a compliment.” Amherst is “an achingly democratic sort of place” where people suggest an expansion of Little League so that no kids feel left out. It’s a place where residents refer to their town, fondly, as “never-never land.” 

“With the exception of Cambridge, Amherst is probably the only place in the United States where men can wear berets and not get beaten up,” Blais writes.

The community fair is “beloved by the citizens because its very tackiness throws into relief Amherst’s superior grace.” Blais cites the basketball team’s coach’s suggested town motto: “Amherst: Where sexuality is an option and reality is an alternative.” Our town has an “international distinction” for…what? Education? Pizza? Therapists? No, for saving spotted salamanders.

Blais cites a therapist named Singingtree, whose daughter is on the basketball team, and our supposedly favored children’s names: “Trillium, Zephyr, Sage, Morningstar, Jett, Orpheus, Willow.” 

She quotes three “classic” newspaper headlines that I remember writing, to illustrate Amherst’s distinctiveness: “Well-dressed man robs Amherst bank,” “Does Amherst have too many committees?” and “Fed by some, feared by others, a thousand feral cats roam Amherst.”

Here’s a partial list of other books set in Amherst. Feel free to add others in the comments section.

• Adventures in Contentment by David Grayson and five subsequent books about a man who leaves the city and finds happiness in a rural setting (which Amherst was 100 years ago, when these popular books were written).
• House by Tracey Kidder (1985). Jonathan Souweine and wife Judith work with an architect and contractors to build a house in South Amherst. “A collection of highly abrasive people succeed in getting along with one another and producing something worthwhile,” according to Kidder’s website.
• House of Happy Endings by Leslie Garis (2007). A memoir of growing up on Spring Street in the 1950s (where Five Colleges Inc. is now) in the long shadow of her grandparents. They were the enormously successful authors of the Uncle Wiggily, Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift and other books. I wrote about the family in this post.
• Emily Dickinson Is Dead by Jane Langton (1984). Near the 100th anniversary of the poet’s death, festivals to mark the occasion are planned. But arson and murder intervene, and a sleuth must solve the mystery.
• Austin and Mabel by Polly Longsworth (1984). The definitive account of the love affair that scandalized late 19th-century Amherst.
• The Belle of Amherst by William Luce (1976). The source of the play that depicts the poet’s life from age 15 to her death at 56.
• The Mouse of Amherst by Elizabeth Spires (1999). A mouse named Emmaline who lives in Emily’s bedroom wonders why she writes day and night. Emmaline writes a poem herself and puts it on Emily’s desk.
• The Dickinsons of Amherst by Jerome Liebling (2001). Over 100 photos of the Dickinson Homestead and the adjacent Evergreens, with accompanying essays.
• Afternoons with Emily by Rose MacMurray (2007). A coming-of-age novel about a girl and the poet, two women who break with convention.
• Miss Emily by Nuala O’Connor (2015). A look at Emily Dickinson through the eyes of an 18-year-old Irish maid.
• Around a Village Green by Mary Adele Allen (1939). This looks at historic buildings, quaint shops and people’s daily routines. 
• Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon (2010). This shows the poet as a “woman beyond her time who found love, spirituality and immortality all on her own terms,” according to amazon.com.
• These Fevered Days by Martha Ackmann (2020). Ten pivotal episodes showing a map of Emily Dickinson’s inner life.
• The Life of Emily Dickinson by Richard B. Sewall (1974). The classic biography explores how the poet was able to see so much from a small window over her desk.
•  A Hedge Away by Daniel Lombardo (1997). An alternative view of the poet’s life and times, by the former curator of special collections at the Jones Library. 

This post has been updated to add the book “Adventures in Contentment” to the list.