• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘I fancy you very often descending to the schoolroom with a plump Binomial Theorem struggling in your hand which you must dissect and exhibit to your uncomprehending ones - I hope you whip them Susie - for my sake - whip them hard.’ In May 1852, when Sue had been away for nine months, she heard that Emily would not permit anything to blossom till her friend’s return, and meant ‘to go out in the garden now, and whip a Crown Imperial for presuming to hold its head up, until you have come home’.

Austin’s letters vented parallel longings. Both treat letters as appeals, hotting one plea then another; they draft and re-draft compulsively, with Emily carrying fragments of half-composed letters about the house in her pocket as she mulls over them whilst she dusts and bakes. Their aim was the same: to possess Susan Gilbert.

‘Nothing could take me from you,’ Austin told Sue, ‘how I value only your love & how all others offered me or that I could have for the taking I care not a dross . . .’. Sue, he assured her, had never failed to answer and more than answer all his dearest dreams of joy. He dreamt of ‘those days when we will be together - how gentle & tender I’ll be with you!’ He liked to think of ‘all the little ways I’ll try to please you’.

One way was to read her favourite passage in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, with its independent and outspoken heroine. Often, though, Sue appears unreal in his letters, an interchangeable object of desire. What Austin desires is a superior woman moved by his performance as a lover. In so far as it’s his drama, not hers, Austin is like Duke Orsino (in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night), mooning over his chosen object, Olivia, in a way that exasperates her. For Olivia can pick up the difference between wooing as rhetorical power-play and genuine eloquence - words welling from buried desire. The Duke’s agent, Viola, releasing her own unspoken desire, can move Olivia, where the Duke, for all his melancholy and all his worldly props, fails.

So there was Austin with a stray lock over his brow and a down-turned, contemptuous mouth. Tempestuously handsome in this moody style, the most eligible bachelor in town, he could not command Sue. To Emily he confided, first, that ‘the world is hollow’, and second, that Sue would not play the love-game.

‘Dollie [Sue’s pet name] is stuffed with sawdust,’ he grumbled.

In their confidences, Austin and Emily were aligned in their poor view of society in general and their sister in particular. Austin dismissed Vinnie for triteness and Emily agreed. In fact, in the early months of 1851 (the sole year Vinnie kept a diary), her reading included Pilgrim’s Progress and David Copperfield, a good step up from Ik Marvel. At eighteen she was back home from boarding school, blooming and more sociable than her sister and brother. She had abundant, wavy hair (dark brown, not red like theirs) with a tilted little nose and round, creamy cheeks. Emily, warning Austin against the danger of ice cream, joked about Vinnie’s plumpness compared with her own ‘skin and bones’: ‘. . . For our sakes Austin wont you try to be careful? I know my sake a’nt much, but Vinnie’s is considerable - it weighs a good many pounds . . .’.

Vinnie was ‘perter and more pert every day’. She had a tart tongue of her own, but it didn’t deter Amherst students in their velvet collars and beaver hats. The President of the College forbade dancing on the Sabbath but it went on in private. To preserve secrecy, dances were called ‘P.O.M. Meetings’: Poetry of Motion. Vinnie favoured the attentions of a Yale graduate, handsome curly-headed Joseph Lyman who often returned to the Homestead. He was a distant connection of Mrs Dickinson and Austin’s schoolmate at Williston Seminary. As a schoolboy of sixteen he had been part of the Dickinson household (‘that charming second home of mine’) for two months, gratified by the understanding of the Dickinson sisters and appreciative of Mrs Dickinson’s food, which he praised as ‘delicate’ - a flair she passed on to her daughters.

From