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learnt. We are protected from its incandescent heat only by a layer of cooled crust, with the lava exploding in ‘paroxysmal’ outbursts, making ‘the future destruction of the earth by fire a not improbable event’. Volcanic power must be deeply seated beneath the earth’s crust, since volcanoes throw out more matter at a single eruption than the whole mountain melted down could supply. A figure in the Hitchcock textbook illustrates earthquakes, their holes in the landscape. She read of the ‘red hot lava which flows over the rim of the crater’. Here are future landscapes for recurrent eruptions in Emily Dickinson’s poems: ‘Etna’s scarlets’ and the lava of Vesuvius as a measure of her own ‘Lava step’.

Hitchcock lingered over the famous eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, which buried Herculaneum and Pompeii. Mount Etna was doubly terrible. Eruptions in the 1660s killed 77,000 people across an area of eighty-four square miles.

Volcanoes and earthquakes in Emily’s schoolbook of the 1840s. A source for her poetic images at a time when geology was disproving the Biblical story of Creation.

A figure (above) demonstrates the underground tunnelling of volcanoes from one stratum to another. Most of their mouths are sealed, representing old and extinct eruptions, but one at the centre, shooting straight up from deep in the earth’s core, erupts with extreme violence. Emily Dickinson would repeatedly draw on volcanic eruptions as metaphors for poetic expression .

Already, as a girl, her brilliance was recognised. Her compositions, said to be unlike anything ever heard, were applauded at fortnightly performances that were central to the Academy’s curriculum: pupils took turns to read either their own essays or extracts from books of their choice. Emily participated keenly - and critically. At twelve, she sassed a boy who read a piece on thinking twice before you speak. The boy pictured a gullible youth who thinks nature has formed a certain young lady to perfection, but who should have remembered that roses conceal thorns. To Emily he appeared ‘the sillyest creature that ever lived I think. I told him that I thought he had better think twice before he spoke.’

At fifteen she lengthened her skirts and teased other girls with a flawless front: ‘I have grown tall a good deal, and wear my golden tresses done up in a net cap. Modesty, you know, forbids me to mention whether my personal appearance has altered.’

That year Mr Dickinson gave her a square piano, and always supplied most of the books she wanted, even if he remained somewhat uneasy. He was ‘too busy with his Briefs - to notice what we do -’, his daughter said later. ‘He buys me many Books - but begs me not to read them - because he fears they joggle the Mind.’

Mr Dickinson believed a woman’s place was at home, but when Emily approached him with her dream to study at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary he did consent. At sixteen and a half, at the end of September 1847, Emily entered the country’s first women’s college. Mary Lyon, the founder, had the conviction of those capable of realising a dream. Her dream was women’s greatness at a time when to many a great woman was a contradiction in terms. In her fifties, her dark hair was secured at the back by a neat, white cap with a lace frill just wide enough to have the effect of a halo around her bared face. Its widely spaced, awake eyes were balanced by a wide mouth, unsmiling but by no means severe. Professor Hitchcock had been her mentor as she came into her own as a scientist and educator, and it was with his backing that she had opened her college for women in South Hadley, Massachusetts, only nine miles from Amherst.

There, Emily found 235 girls up against rising academic standards: if they failed the frequent examinations they were sent away. Holyoke held assessments of new students soon after their arrival; Emily was nervous but coped easily. Apart from ancient history and rhetoric, she took all science courses: algebra, Euclid [geometry], physiology, chemistry and astronomy. The aim of all this, according to Miss Lyon, was to