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By Root 777 0

Emily’s mention of her ‘fixed melancholy’ (in reaction to Sophia’s death) when she was fourteen. In the spring of 1848, when she was seventeen, she joked about a fading cough intimidated by the force of Mr Dickinson’s dosings, yet a cough sounds too slight to warrant her father’s alarm. Critical opinion that she had ‘pulmonary episodes’ stretches thin facts; most inhabitants of Amherst would have had the odd cough without it interrupting their lives. The poet, as an adult, was not tubercular, on any evidence we have: in a place rife with small-town gossip, no whisper of consumption follows her. To go on what her letters give out, as though an answer were to hand, is to block off the mystery.

Tantalisingly - irresistibly - her voice draws us towards a secret that ‘struck’ the regulated course of her life. Was it a genuine secret, an unnamed ill concealed by her misleading report of a cough?

When Emily is removed from college at the age of seventeen, there’s a gap in the record surrounded by questionable facts. Her tears and pleas when Austin comes for her show her resisting her family’s fear, though under other circumstances she’s glad to go home. Worth noting too: her sickness does not incapacitate her from studying at home, as proved by her performance in the examinations of the following term.

On Emily’s return to Holyoke after the spring vacation, her invalid cousin Zebina sends her a ‘long’ letter in June. She replies, though this letter does not survive. Why does Zebina write at length - why does he write at all? As far as we know, they were not correspondents.

Another unexplained oddity: Emily’s ill-health over the winter had not been apparent to college authorities. There were daily checks on health, and in addition a college rule - an unpopular rule, insistently enforced - that girls had to report on one another. If a student objected she was welcome to leave, Miss Lyon would warn in her address to newcomers. A vigilant eye on pupils penetrated even the privacy of their rooms: girls had to sleep with doors ajar and teachers would now and then patrol the corridors. Spying, to put it plainly, was threaded through the fabric of Holyoke. A bad and persistent cough is unlikely to have escaped detection. The trouble, it seems, did not lie in her lungs.

What Emily confessed more readily was homesickness compounded by loneliness. ‘A desolate feeling comes home to my heart, to think I am alone,’ she told Austin.

Surrounded as she was by intelligent girls of the same age, why was this student quite so alone? The reason is obvious. As a non-convert who remained impenitent, she would have been made to feel uncomfortable in the sweetly enquiring style of fellow students. Their questionings and proddings would have been part of the pressure to succumb during Emily’s second term, when the revival reached its peak.

Emily was wary of these girls. ‘Their tones fall strangely on my ear & their countenances meet mine not like home faces . . .’.

She roomed with an apparently considerate Norcross cousin, another Emily, who, unknown to her, was reporting on their conversations, using the trust of a family tie and their intimacy as roommates to prise open Emily’s reluctance to declare herself a Christian. Her cousin proved a conscientious informer on Emily Dickinson in a letter to members of the prayer meeting in Monson, Mrs Dickinson’s home town. Emily’s sister Vinnie later said there had been ‘real ogres’ at Holyoke, and if this be true one of the ogres is likely to have been Hannah Porter, in a beribboned bonnet and richly trimmed black stole. With a concave chest and down-turned mouth, Mrs Porter lacked the impressive purity of Miss Lyon’s bearing but she was a tireless leader of revivals. Emily’s Monson relations were members of her First Female Praying Circle. According to her roommate’s reports to this group, Emily’s unbudging answer was that she felt ‘no interest’, the code phrase for having no intimation of grace. To fellow students who rejoiced in their own intimations, Emily Dickinson seemed unregenerate, even wicked,