Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [31]
Suppose ‘Topknot’ should condescend to speak to his sisters? Suppose this ‘most ungrateful of brothers’ should ‘doff his crown, and lay down his lofty sceptre’? So she wonders, and then puts on a display of deference if such is what he wants. ‘Permit me to tie your shoe, to run like a dog behind you. I can bark, see here! Bow wow!’ A young woman who casts herself as domestic pet ‘dare not’ climb on high to where Austin sits like Jove on Olympus. From behind this teasing camouflage an irrepressible sister shoots down Austin’s importance.
‘Fear the King!’ came his command.
‘Exit Sue!!!’ Emily flashed back, aware he had an eye for a girl who was not one to put up with kingship.
Susan Huntington Gilbert, born in the same month as Emily, was the orphaned daughter of Harriet Arms and Thomas Gilbert, a veteran of the War of 1812 who had taken on various public offices and kept an inn at Old Deerfield, ten miles from Amherst. The Gilberts were an established family in the area and there were some educated and prosperous relations but, like the Dickinsons’ grandfather, Thomas Gilbert fell into bankruptcy in his last years - hastened, in his case, by drink. He and his wife both died young, leaving six children. ‘Susie’, their youngest, was eleven. The two sons went out west and prospered. The four daughters were brought up by their mother’s sister, Sophia Arms Van Vranken, in Geneva in upstate New York. Sue was schooled to a high standard: in recognition of her abilities she was sent for one year, 1846-7, to Amherst Academy, where she studied with the boys on the classical side. She then completed her formal education at the Utica Female Seminary, known as Miss Kelly’s, which emphasised teacher training. There, from 1848 to 1850, Sue excelled in mathematics, so much so that one instructor, a Yale man, told her that she ought to go to Yale College. Sue also had a way with words: what letters survive combine humour with alertness to what others feel. If any girl should have gone to college Susan was suited, avid as she was for books - eventually she would amass about three thousand volumes. Though Emily Dickinson recognised the limitations of approved novels she still read them - novels, she joked, about irreproachable girls who did not indulge in low-voiced questions. Sue’s taste was surer: she read works of literature as they appeared, especially the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and everything by the Brontës. She had little money and spent nothing on clothes, but she did lay hands on books of lasting quality. This was a girl who could tell the difference between the page that perishes and the page that endures.
For all her intelligence, Susan Gilbert could not expect the advantage of higher education, and neither she or anyone in her family considered it. Where Emily Dickinson approached a discerning father, Susan was blocked as an orphan. She did look to her eldest brother as to a father, but he was too far away and she too proud to beg more than small favours. Her manner to him did not presume on the affection she offered; it was gravely respectful and uncomplaining, a serious voice with none of Emily’s sass. She could never permit herself to forget the weak position of a poor relation.
In 1848 Susan’s eldest sister Harriet had married an Amherst merchant called William Cutler. This brought Sue back to Amherst when the time came to leave Miss Kelly’s. She was to live with Harriet, together with her two older sisters, Mary and Martha. Mary, the elder of the two, was clever like Sue and mothered her as the baby of the family. In September 1849 Mary married a schoolmaster called (appropriately) Mr Learned. They settled in Sunbury, North Carolina, and the following July Mary gave birth. A few days later she died of puerperal fever, with Martha present. While Martha joined their brothers in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sue, in shock, remained with Harriet in Amherst and looked for consolation in the latest revival. In August 1850, kneeling in her plain, black dress, speaking her loss