Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [117]
Mabel didn’t make this up; it was what Austin had told her. ‘He has begun to feel that it does not do for persons of entirely different social grades to marry,’ Mabel reports in her journal of 1885. She was given an impression that Austin’s sole motive for his marriage had been to inject the ‘bodily vigor’ into his family. Sue had ‘made him marry her, in spite of his terrible repugnance to doing it’. According to Mabel’s journal, Austin likened his wedding to an execution. Austin, it appears, has told her nothing of the way he pursued Sue in the 1850s. But then, nothing in Austin’s hand was ever on paper to confirm this melodrama of the doomed bridegroom.
Mabel set down things he’d said: Austin’s ‘entire disappointment’ in the marriage, and his entrapment, as a fly caught in a spider’s web. The truth, of course, is that it was Sue who’d been reluctant and in the end unable to escape the marriage. But Austin was not one to tell a deliberate lie. Thirty years on, this must be what he’d come to believe. It was easier than attempting to explore why Sue didn’t adore and make love with him. Mabel includes abortions in the list of accusations, with no apparent recollection of her own attempts to abort Millicent. Mabel relays Sue’s fear of childbirth as Austin’s grievance. Her ‘morbid dread of having children has hurt & distressed his life to the quick. She caused three or four to be artificially removed before Ned. And she did everything in her power to rid herself of him - to which efforts all his ill-health is attributed.’
Mabel fires up over her lover’s alleged report that Sue’s ‘fits of horrible & entirely unrestrained temper have put Austin several times in danger of his life, & he says if anything should happen to him suddenly we may be tolerably sure she has killed him’. A specific accusation is that Sue once threw a knife at her husband.
Sue’s temper has come down to us as a trait that estranged Emily. It’s true that Sue’s Christmas gift in 1880, Disraeli’s Endymion, was inscribed to Emily ‘who not seeing I still love’. That this amounted to estrangement is disproved by two letters in 1881, the year Mabel entered the scene. Emily had asked Dr Holland how he’d managed to snare William Dean Howells whose novel, A Fearful Responsibility, was serialised in Scribner’s Magazine. The editor had replied:
Emily -
Case of Bribery - Money did it -
Holland -
Emily shared this note with Sue who, she recounts to Dr Holland, ‘took Ned’s Arm and came across - and we all talked of Mr Samuel [Bowles] and you, and vital times when you two bore the Republican, and came as near sighing - all of us - as would be often wise - I should say next door - Sue said she was homesick for those “better days,” hallowed be their name’.
There’s a hint here of treading on eggshells with Austin next door, but no coldness between Sue and Emily. If anything, Emily’s tone is commiseration constrained by loyalty to her reserved and frowning brother.
‘And you alone have found me out,’ Austin told Mabel. ‘I never revealed myself to another - you know it - there was but one key. That you had. You have turned it, and entered in. You have conquered me, by such sweet winning ways.’
He was a person who oscillated between extremes of reserve and emotional abandon, a temperament similar to his sister’s. Their volatility made the stable routines of home all the more necessary. As homemaker Susan had excelled, all the more keenly after her orphaned youth and discomfort in her brother-in-law’s house. To counter Sue’s domesticity (something Mabel always despised), she projects on to Sue the illegitimate ploys of a mistress.
‘It seems unfair that she should be cold and dreadful to me, and overpoweringly sweet to you,’ she put it to Austin. ‘You are petted & cajoled, and I am hated.’
How was Mabel to evict a wife so entrenched in The Evergreens? Susan had channelled her considerable gifts of mind and taste into her home. The Evergreens was a centre of culture: its dinners delicious, running to many courses on gala occasions;