Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [18]
So when Emily pressed her ‘papers’ on schoolmates there were few or no replies. Sabra did visit, ‘but as usual she went off in a hurry’. Abiah, who had returned home to Springfield, was invited to stay, with a promise to ‘entertain you to the best of my abilities, which you know are neither few nor small’, but Abiah saw only Sabra, to whom she was related. These are the first indications that, however uncommon Emily might be - ‘you know how I hate to be common’, she remarked to Abiah - the world out there would not be inclined to respond. ‘This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me—’, she would later write.
In June 1846, when Emily was fifteen and a half, she began to dream night and day of higher education. In some haste she began to revise arithmetic and move on with algebra, geometry and ecclesiastical history.
‘I am fitting to go to South Hadley Seminary [as Mount Holyoke was known], and expect if my health is good to enter that institution a year from next fall’, she confided to Abiah.
Her health in fact was ‘very poor’ all summer, accompanied by the usual ‘bad feelings’, and she was removed from school for the summer and autumn terms, altogether about six months. She expressed her dismay to Abiah: ‘It cost me many a severe struggle to leave my studies & be considered an invalid, but my health demanded a release from all care & I made the sacrifice.’
Though ‘sacrifice’ may seem over the top, girls of this generation did not take education for granted. They spoke of loving school and their teachers who were friendly, intelligent young women, most of them not much older than their pupils. These were not career-teachers; after a while they would depart to make their ‘wedding gear’, and this relatively short space of pink-cheeked independence in their lives offered a captivating model. One such ‘preceptress’ was Miss Rebecca Woodbridge, the twenty-year-old daughter of a clergyman. Emily described her as tall and slender with ‘rose bud’ cheeks and dimples ‘which come & go like the ripples in yonder merry brook - & then she is so affectionate . . .’. Emily dwelt on ‘affection’ with the intensity of a girl for whom attachments are tenacious.
‘I am always in love with my teachers’, she was not shy to declare. When Miss Adams left to be married it seemed to Emily ‘lonely and strange’. Not even the dimples of Miss Woodbridge could quite make up for this loss. One compensation was to write long letters to ’Biah, more because Abiah was loyal than because the two girls were alike. She had initially appealed to Emily by arriving at school bedecked with dandelions arranged as curls when she was due to perform at one of their Wednesday sessions of Speaking and Composition. Abiah had further endeared herself to the future poet with a secret: she was writing a romance. Then, all too soon, she succumbed to the pressures of conformity. Once Abiah found herself saved the two had less to say to each other.
Emily felt obliged to talk of ‘the shining company above’ who tune their ‘golden harps’ to a redeemed sinner. A physical fondness for pretty, fresh-faced Abiah remained: ‘I could not wait to press you to my arms.’ All the same, Emily was so put off by her effort to lend herself to Abiah’s terms, mouthing clichés of regret for remaining unsaved, together with hopes that her better self will conquer the temptations of worldliness, that there came a day when, throwing phoney phrases aside, Emily tossed a mad letter to Abiah. It was mad in that she unleashed a visionary superiority meant to disconcert the tamed girl Abiah had become.
‘God is sitting here’, Emily strikes up, ‘and I dont dare to look directly