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By Root 589 0

their visitor and in time invited her back for another stay, but it never occurred to them to go so far as to offer her a permanent home. Sickly Mrs Bartlett, who welcomed Sue’s help with the baby, was not about to adopt a young woman of twenty-two in need of a life. Wrenching herself away in March 1853, still in her buttoned-up mourning, Sue was once more travelling alone. Her route back to Mr Cutler took her via Boston, and she stopped overnight at a hotel called Revere House, a questionable situation for a young woman on her own. Here, in Boston, was Austin Dickinson, newly admitted to Harvard Law School. When they met that night, 23 March, Susan consented to be engaged.

‘Those hours, Sue, let us never forget - & I can never be unhappy,’ Austin wrote after she left, ‘those sweet kisses you, leaning over me imprinted on my forehead - our parting that night - how warmly you let me press you to my heart - & how passionately you clung around my neck - and held my lips to yours let me never forget - Let me never forget it all - and I never shall doubt that the deepest, strongest love . . . has been given to me -’. It seemed to him a miracle that their sharp-edged characters should come together.

The time had come to set himself straight with Mat, as his sisters had advised. On 27 March, four days after the tryst with Susan, Austin drafted an eight-page letter to the sister who loved him more:

Forgive me now Mattie will you for not writing to you before. It is not because I have not thought of you - nor because I do not love you - I do love you Mattie - just as well as Emily and Vinnie . . . you all enter into all Sue’s & my plans for the future - . . . You shall be with us then Mat if you have chosen no other, fuller home - and live as much like a spoiled child as love & indulgence can induce you . . . The world is very wide & Fortune very kind and fears & doubts are for the weak and wicked . . . [Sue and I] love each other Mattie with a love that knows no cessation - no abate - that is larger with every new morning, & sweeter with every coming evening - that makes all things possible . . . We have loved each other a long time.

Martha did not reply for two months, and then was forced to comply by another disingenuous nudge from Austin, offloading his guilt on to his future sister-in-law, to whom he had always felt so brotherly that he can’t understand her silence at news of the forthcoming marriage. Martha joined her brothers in Grand Haven, Michigan, and did not return to Amherst for the rest of 1853. She lived another four years in Amherst but spent more time with her aunt in Geneva, and then married a Geneva merchant called Smith. The bond with her ‘twin’ was unbroken, and whether Martha showed Sue the letters Austin sent her, or whether Sue regretted the impulse to yield to a man her sister had desired, we can’t know - only that his choice had been driven by a capacity for hero worship inherited from a Puritan father. This much Susan discerned as the years passed. Every autumn twin-Sue who became Mrs Dickinson would visit Geneva, but twin-Martha who became Mrs Smith did not often return these visits. Martha’s was not a visible tragedy. She did not go into a decline; nor did she retire from the world to nurse disappointed love.

What Emily thought of this is unrecorded, but it’s clear that she closed the door on Martha, beyond the odd pleasantry: she might, for instance, remark to Sue that she hadn’t heard from Martha for a long time. A cooling, then, after their intimacy. Her first loyalty was to the brother in whom she had long recognised an ascetic tendency, susceptible to stern pledges of renunciation. Attraction to women was the obvious antidote, and so long as he remained uncommitted Emily had advised Austin not to let ties block any spontaneous liking. It wasn’t the old double standard; more, her determination to stop her brother from stiffening into a replica of what was pure and terrible in their father. When he had been flirting with both Gilbert sisters Emily had teased him with a prospect of twin-Martha