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Her spaced eyes and large, full mouth were too keen for the passivity admired in women of her time. The well-known daguerreotype taken when she was sixteen bares the face of a person who, as her brother put it, ‘saw things directly and just as they were’. Her sister called it a ‘startling’ face. There was a widening divide between people she wished to know and those she didn’t. She abhorred sham: social talk instead of truth; piety instead of ‘the Soul’s Superior instants’. Her directness would have been disconcerting if she did not ‘simulate’ conventionality. This she could do: as a girl longing for valentines, or tinkling out ‘a sweet little song’ (‘Maiden Weep No More’), or playing to the solemnity of pious girls, she appeared indistinguishable from her contemporaries, yet she grew less inclined to make the effort. Though she disparaged herself as the ‘only Kangaroo’ amid Beauty, she had the creature’s long, sloping neck holding up a sensitive face with the full eyes of a watcher. Another self-image is consciously charming, with eyes like sherry at the bottom of a glass, she said, and hair the colour of a chestnut burr. She sees herself in colour, but adjusts this to contemporary taste, for her hair was red like her brother’s. She had the pale skin and summer freckles that go with red hair.

A schoolmate recalled her voice as high and clear. It had ‘a strangely indefinable quality of surprise - almost an accent of consternation’. Austin’s voice had a similar interrogative lift. What the schoolmate thought strange was a teasing irony.

One of her poems pictures herself as a wren: small, neat, with eyes and head on the alert. The daguerreotype shows the delicate frame of a girl who, from time to time, was removed from school for reasons of health. As she moved through her twenties, when she was fanning her poetic fire, she would have made no concession to the ringlets and doll-like crinolines of the 1850s. Her full, slightly jutting lower lip would have firmed as she grew older. The assurance and humour of her mature writing suggests an air of composure, unlike the vulnerable girl.

The vulnerable image encouraged the pathos woven into her popularity. How the public loves wounded genius! How it loves her all the more if she be unmated, seething with love denied, an all-time poet unrecognised in her lifetime. But the Emily Dickinson who speaks through her letters makes no concession to helplessness. This is not a person so frail, so wrapped up in writing that, in time, she would sidestep the rupture in her family. Nor is she unmindful of her family’s standing: a status too secure for ostentation or the ephemeral absurdities of fashion: the one surviving dress confirms her continued simplicity. Her curly hair, cut short in her early twenties, was long again in her late twenties, parted in the centre and drawn back over her ears in smooth bands. The uprightness of her posture suggests New England correctness. This young woman has gentility - more distinguished in its way than aristocratic gentility because there is nothing above it, nothing between it and the superiority of superior instants. Who amongst us can face her steady, watchful eye? For there’s something at the back of that eye that warns us to be very, very careful. How does the propriety fit what’s wild in her poetry? The two could only be conjoined in a force-field where control (the tight net of the quatrain) and the uncontained (‘Wild nights—Wild nights!’) are both in play, not in conflict, for control deploys as well as holds down secrets surging to the surface. One flares for a second, a fuse packed in riddling turns of phrase, when she calls Aunt Elizabeth (her father’s bossy youngest sister, registered at birth as male) ‘the only male relative on the female side’.

As a young man Mr Dickinson had chosen a wife after a different mould. Mrs Dickinson followed the cult of true womanhood as laid down by the Revd John Bennett in his Letters to a Young Lady (1789), reprinted in 1824, four years before Emily