Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [37]
When school closed Sue returned to Mr Cutler’s house with nothing to show for the last ten months, beyond taking herself off his unwilling hands. Another alternative occurred to her the following winter while she visited the Bartlett family. Mrs Bartlett had been Mary Learned, sister-in-law to Sue’s beloved Mary. As early as 1851 Mrs Bartlett, often ill, had conceived an idea of inviting Sue Gilbert to stay in the capacity of guest-helper. At that time Sue had preferred to pursue a career of her own, but after school-teaching failed to support her the Bartletts renewed their invitation. In the winter of 1853 they, with a new baby, were living in Manchester, New Hampshire. Sue now agreed to join them, a little apprehensive at the prospect of a stay with strangers but willing to try her hand at babycare. She took the unusual step of exposing her vulnerability in the hope of securing a sensitive welcome.
‘Has it occurred to you that perhaps we shall not like each other,’ Sue wrote to Mary Bartlett a month before going. ‘I really begin almost to fear meeting people I have never seen, but think I shall have courage for the encounter when it comes.’ Her voice took courage from the new candour in women’s writing, coloured perhaps by the voice of Elizabeth Barrett Browning whose recent volume of Poems (1852) she carried with her on the journey northwards.
Fear proved unnecessary. Sue found herself in a gentle place, so much so that she fell in love with the whole family. The intellectual taste of the Revd Mr Bartlett was particularly congenial to a bookish young woman deprived of higher education. He was a Dartmouth graduate who later became president of the college. The family had been alerted by Julius Learned that Sue was ‘some punkins’ (outstanding), and Mr Bartlett’s talks with her must have confirmed this for he gave her a copy of Charlotte Brontë’s newly published Villette, the story of an outwardly cold orphan called Lucy Snowe who discovers her buried ability when she goes abroad in search of a new way to support herself. Miss Snowe, who ventures alone, geographically and mentally, defines herself as ‘a rising character’. Sue responded with unaccustomed extravagance: after she left she let the Bartletts know how much they suited her buried life - a hint of her wish to belong to them, in accents of barely veiled desperation:
. . . I am really lonely to go back to you and it will be the work of weeks, to get possession of a contented spirit, and my old resigned temper of mind. I loved you and Mr. Bartlett, as I have no others save my own brothers and sisters, and if I live the years of Methuselah I never shall forget the sympathy and affection I found with you . . . There was something in the atmosphere of your home just suited to my life - something so kindly and gentle (laugh at me if you will) I can’t think of you all without crying like a child.
Susan’s declaration that ‘no others’ had evoked this depth of attachment is surprising in the context of the passionate letters Austin and Emily Dickinson had penned and, more particularly, Emily’s captivating invitation to share her poetic destiny. It came to her as a voyage out, a promise of sailing together ‘On this wondrous sea’, the poet as pilot, towards a timeless shore. Intrepid, resolute, they would find their own terra incognita:
Thither I pilot thee—
Land Ho! Eternity!
Ashore at last!
She sent this poem, the first of many, to Sue in New Hampshire in March 1853. Yet Sue turned like a needy child to the Bartletts. Her declaration to them can’t have been mere gratitude or flattery; she obviously cared for them too much for her own good. It seems that she really did prefer this ‘gentle’ family to the Dickinsons, whose emotions were molten and rumbling underground, audible to those in their emotional vicinity. If Sue wished to seek safer ground she was less at liberty to draw away than a succession of earlier intimates who had left town. Sue, in fact, appreciated Mr Dickinson, who turned away from emotion.
The Bartletts were pleased with