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compilation of Dickinson’s writings to Sue, makes this clear: the book is for Mattie Dickinson and Mary Hampson, and to defend the love of Susan and Emily. Dickinson’s outspoken ardour did embrace members of her own sex, and no one more than ‘Sister’. At the same time, she was not impervious to the opposite sex. It is as vital to redress slanders on Sue’s behalf as to consider the variables of Dickinson’s sexual nature and changes of fashion in language. The language of love flowed freely in the correspondence of nineteenth-century women. Even so, the poet is less casual to judge from the calculated gender shift in ‘Amputate my freckled bosom! / Make me bearded like a man!’ Although there’s no evidence that she put same-sex love into practice, the sustained improvisation of imaginative love can be more passionate and enduring than finite physical acts, and Dickinson celebrates the constancy of the unmarried ‘Wife’ who feels like a man. Yet nothing Dickinson feels quite fits our labels because her spark of spiritual connection carries her off even as she stirs our unseen selves.

V: OUTLIVING THE LEGEND

Mary Hampson lived to her nineties. Faithful to the last, she preserved everything left at The Evergreens. When she died in 1988 the door shut on a time capsule. The melancholy house remained much as it was in the 1880s. By June 2003 it had been uninhabited for fifteen years. When the key turned and the door opened on the shuttered hall its reds crept out of the shadow: faded red wallpaper in tatters and a worn carpet of the same colour leading the way upstairs. A relic of the Homestead was the first to emerge from the murk: a sofa that Sue had covered in dark red velvet, once the black horsehair sofa where Austin and Mabel had held together throughout 1884, defying the rows next door.

All the while, the fame of Emily Dickinson spread throughout the world. This was both sure and gradual, like an invisible path through a thicket that opens into a series of clearings. We glimpse her here and there until the poet emerges, as she foresaw a century and a half ago, one of the ‘favorites’ amongst the all-time few:

Eternity’s disclosure

To favorites—a few—

Of the Colossal substance

Of Immortality

Unanswered and unanswerable questions resonate in the wake of lives, and no one more elusive than Emily Dickinson. She warned Higginson not to take the ‘I’ of her poems to be herself. Was this a cover? ‘I’ speaks of inward event with singular assurance: the divine Guest who keeps her company. ‘The Soul that hath a Guest / Doth seldom go abroad—’, she wrote at about the age of thirty-two, and then again at forty-nine: ‘Immortality as a guest is sacred’. How much was genuine confession, how much dramatic monologue? The theatricality of her confessions was, at origin, a mode of rebellion against the sober, heartfelt declarations of faith expected of her milieu - the sole public drama open to a woman of her time and place. Behind her door behind the hedge a flagrant voice burst into alternative confessions: visions, ‘Master’, forbidden passion, wild nights.

There is no doubt of the prime drama of Dickinson’s life: the incursions of ‘The Spirit’. She confided to [Judge Lord?]: ‘The Spirit never twice alike, but every time another - the other more divine.’ As readers of the ‘priceless’ future - the poet’s intimates - we are allowed a glimpse (the little we can take) of the Guest from beyond our world. What happened, she tells us, is a ‘Flash—/ And Click—and Suddenness’, as though lightning opened up a sacred place. To this place she feels a ‘distinct connection’.

The ‘waylaying Light’ removed her from official versions of the supernatural. In this the visionary Emily Brontë was her familiar. Neither she nor Dickinson fits the pious mould because they are fearless - anything but meek. ‘Life is so strong a vision’ for Dickinson that nothing she sees ‘can fail’. Were it not for ‘partings’ with those she loved, living was ‘too divine’. ‘Partings’, she says. Not loss. The dead are near as the divine is near in the way Emily Brontë felt