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Taggard’s candidate was George Gould, a young man with a blandly elongated face who had been a classmate of Austin and the probable recipient of a valentine composed by Emily in 1850. Spoofing Gould’s ministerial intentions (‘we will ride up the hill of glory - Hallelujah, all hail!’), her verse is hardly a basis for deathless love.

Taggard’s source was Vinnie’s one-time copyist Mary Lee Hall, a gossip protected by anonymity. (Taggard’s documentation amounts to a series of dashes to indicate the informant.) Just as Mattie claimed to have had it direct from Aunt Lavinia and Sue Dickinson that Wadsworth was the one, so Miss Hall claims, on the basis of hearsay, that it must be the Revd Gould because Miss Vinnie had told this to someone in strictest confidence.

Here another myth was imposed on the poet: this time, a tyrannical father. According to Miss Hall, Mr Dickinson was opposed to either daughter marrying, and particularly opposed to Gould because he was poor.

Taggard favoured Gould because her demurely virtuous Emily ‘would never have allowed herself to fall more than a little in love with an already married man’. No, Emily gloried in married love and loved the Bowleses because they loved each other.

Taggard’s fancy can’t let go a rapturous encounter in Philadelphia, even though in the mid-1850s Gould happened to be three thousand miles away in California. An unobtrusive footnote admits this inconvenient fact.

Meanwhile another centenary biographer, Josephine Pollitt, came up with a new candidate for Emily’s love: none other than Major Hunt, the first husband of Helen Hunt Jackson. Pollitt plumps for Hunt on the basis of Emily’s remark to Higginson that Lieutenant Hunt (as he was when he and his wife visited the Homestead in 1860) had interested her more than any other man she ever saw. What had appealed to her at the time had been a joke: there had been food on the table, with Carlo, Emily’s dog, in wait for a morsel to fall. ‘Your dog understands gravitation,’ Hunt had said with mock sagacity.

Pollitt’s husband Frederick A. Pohl, who had helped with ‘tedious’ research, contrived to turn a silly book into an even sillier play called Brittle Heaven. On stage in New York and Boston the ‘tempery’ wife Helen Hunt vies with the poet as to who will own the man. Helen doesn’t deserve him because she’s a shallow creature of the flesh; her husband prefers a chaste poet. The two women glare at each other through a dialogue of banal spats. Costumed in puffed sleeves and covered in ribbons and bows, ‘Emily’ was photographed as she gives Hunt a wan look while Helen fumes in the background.

In the absence of facts about the poet, banal fancies multiplied. Desperate to get Hunt away from ‘Emily’, Helen persuades Hunt’s boss to transfer him to service in the Civil War while Helen’s plea of childhood friendship prevents ‘Emily’ from keeping a tryst with Hunt before he leaves for the South. Two years elapse (the years, incidentally, of Dickinson’s greatest fertility as a poet). Renunciation has driven the poet into a nervous decline. Then Helen reappears in Amherst to own that Emily’s renunciation has won Hunt’s love forever. Exalted, ‘Emily’ decides to go to him. She and Sister Sue are planning a secret jaunt to the battlefields when Sam Bowles arrives with the news of Hunt’s death. ‘Emily’ sinks. Curtain.

On 10 May of the centenary year Mattie opened The Evergreens to fifty invited guests, including Mrs Dwight Morrow (whose husband, an Amherst graduate, was US ambassador to Mexico - appointed by President Coolidge, another Amherst graduate), representing Smith College. Mattie had more invitations to speak than she could manage. At Columbia’s summer school she lectured on ‘The Real Emily Dickinson’ and the chair responded: ‘We can safely leave our Emily Dickinson in your hands.’ In October, a hundred and fifty women made a ‘pilgrimage’ to The Evergreens. Then Yale University held a ‘birthday party’ in December. It