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Emily Dickinson looked on marriage in the same coercive light as organised religion: to be ‘bridalled’ was to be ‘shrouded’. Men, she waved away as ‘boots and whiskers’. No living man would ever again fertilise her poetry with Newton’s conviction, none short of ‘Papa above’, with whom she continued to wrestle. As a poet she rejected the set conversion narrative in favour of a biblical drama of her own choosing, that of Jacob who, in a dream, wrestles all night with a man and at daybreak finds his thigh out of joint. He limps away saying, ‘I have seen God face to face.’ There’s a spirit strong enough to take on the divine, resulting in an onrush of superhuman strength. Dickinson has the nerve to claim more. As day breaks, her astonished Wrestler finds that he has ‘worsted God’.

If the traditional authority of ‘Papa above’ provoked the contender in Emily Dickinson, women were another matter. Ever since her childhood bed-play with Jane, Emily warmed to women with whom she could strip her mask. This included her young teachers at Amherst Academy, whose own lives were yet in the making. While still at Holyoke, she romanticised her one-time teacher Helen Humphrey Palmer, Jane’s elder sister, widowed soon after her marriage. How beautiful Helen would look in mourning, Emily mused, preferring the husbandless to the ‘bridalled’. Her imagination circled around chosen intimates whom she wooed with letters. ‘The Soul selects her own Society—/ Then—shuts the Door—’. In this decisive manner she swung from reserve with fellow students towards the ‘kernel’ people who nourished her expressiveness. What exactly she required, and how to make it her own, remained in question.

This poet had extraordinary strokes of fortune, not least the advantage of an education closed to women in other countries. Her volcanic temperament was cooled and tautened by scientific training. Her wit won her father’s support and she had the luck to come upon a timely mentor. Newton’s impact was brief, yet enough to get her poetry going. Perfectionist as she was, she needed only the spur of a reader’s assent to the sublime spark she already had when she was ‘new—and small’.

Circumstances can’t explain genius, but they helped her preserve it in a society with a habit of fundamentalist bullying. Her ‘Difference’ from others, far from blocking her, made her ‘bold’. How boldly confident she was as she refused to succumb to successive revivals, waiting on the fruit of her soul. But this ‘Present’ from ‘the Gods’ was, as she knew, precarious. It remained for her to devise the shell - the outward life - to shield so rare a kernel.

3

SISTER

As a girl Emily Dickinson did not disguise her character from Jane Humphrey: her boldness, her revelling in the dreams of ‘blessed’ night and her ‘wickedness’. During another religious revival, in April 1850, she stood alone ‘in rebellion’, gazing enviously but still unyielding at those of her circle, including her sister Vinnie and friend Abby Wood, who went about with softened, tear-filled eyes and gentled voices, manifesting holiness.

Her brother, to whom she sent a philosophic letter, slapped her down with the carelessness of a young man who might have occasion to mention ‘the author in me’. He could not comprehend her, he complained, so would she speak in a simpler style?

Did he expect her to be a ‘little ninny’, she replied in mock indignation, ‘while I pant and struggle and climb the nearest cloud, you walk out very leisurely in your slippers from Empyrean, and . . . request me to get down! As simple as you please, the simplest sort of simple - I’ll be . . . a little pussy catty, a little Red Riding Hood, I’ll wear a Bee in my Bonnet, and a Rose bud in my hair, and what remains to do you shall be told hereafter.’

Her determination to ‘do’ was already a counter to caricatures of femininity - pet, victim, dimwit and rosebud - who don’t venture to ‘climb’. Emily’s education gave her the confidence to tease the superiority Austin began to assume after his