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Next time to stay!

Next time, the things to see

By ear unheard—

Unscrutinized by eye!

Next time to tarry

While Ages steal—

Tramp the slow Centuries

And the Cycles wheel!

It’s to Susan and no one else that the poet ‘reports’ this crossing of the ‘Line’: the ultimate frontier. So when Susan offered this poem for publication early in 1891 it was not only for others to read, but also a validation of her tie with the poet.

She identified herself to Ward in her twofold capacity as wife to Dickinson’s brother and a chosen reader who had been at one with Dickinson’s gift ‘as I have known and felt it since our early girlhood intimacy’, poems ‘clear and crisp as soul’s crystal to me’.

Susan protested more freely to Ward: ‘All the more am I indignant at the silly fear of the public or lack of ability to recognize the power of many [poems] that were ruled out of the volume just printed.’ Her hope was to establish a rival relationship with a powerful editor. ‘I have many manuscript letter-poems from which I mean to make up into a unique volume as I can command the time.’

Todd, of course, could always command the time. Her advantage over Susan was not time or understanding, but the initiative to press on. Susan was not ‘lazy’; her home, anyone could see, was a model of domestic industry. She did transcribe about eighty poems (eliminating the dashes and capitalisations) and selected another fifty-nine for typing, since her own difficult hand was unlikely to engage editors. Sadly this effort, coming from the source closest to the poet, could not surface. Susan Dickinson found herself silenced.

If Susan had expected Lavinia to be gratified by the timely publication from her private hoard on 12 March 1891, the spirit of strife proved stronger. It is hard to like a person you have knowingly injured, who then stops speaking to you. Lavinia assuaged her guilt by liking Sue less. Then, too, the triumphant outcome of co-opting Todd hardened her partisan position. At the time Mabel Todd undertook to edit a second volume of the poems and contemplated a volume of letters, Lavinia turned against Susan, the primacy of whose tie with Emily was ever more evident as letters came to light. Why had Emily confided in Sue and concealed this hoard from the sister who had protected her so faithfully?

So it was that Lavinia fired a shot against Sue’s publication. Her protest to Ward laid out the law of ownership. A writer might give a manuscript to someone else, but the possessor is not the owner. Legally, the copyright on the writing remains with writer, and upon death transfers to the writer’s heir. On the basis of Emily’s will, which left Lavinia ‘everything’, Lavinia claimed (pushing the point) that Emily had granted her exclusive rights to her papers, and though Emily gave copies of poems to others they were given simply for private reading ‘and not to pass the property in them, which is mine’.

Unsurprisingly Susan challenged this. She had lost her husband to Mabel. Her friendship with Lavinia was being destroyed and now the thing she held most dear, her private relationship with Emily, was being ripped from her. She sounds a little desperate as she writes to Ward: ‘the sister is quite jealous of my treasure . . . All[?] [the poems and letters] I have are mine - given me by my dear Emily while living[,] so I can in honor do with them as I please.’

Ward, caught in the crossfire of these claims, politely declined further poems from the Dickinson papers. Sue apologised ‘that I so innocently have drawn you into a hornets’ nest. I beg that you will not be drawn into any correspondence with Miss Lavinia over the poems or allow yourself to be troubled by her foolish fits of temper . . . She feels a little baffled by my possession of so many mss. of Emily’s and is very foolish in her talk of law. I am quite used to her vagaries, and while I pity her, I shall never yield a line in my possession to her . . . I have a little article in my mind, with illustrations of Emily’s own, showing her witty humorous