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So stationed I could catch the mint That never ceased to fall—. . .

The face is hidden; only the voice is heard. Other all-time poets have counselled invisibility as the condition of truth. ‘Flee from the prees [crowd],’ Chaucer advised, ‘and dwelle with sothfastnesse.’ ‘I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing,’ Yeats declared. None pursued invisibility as strictly as Dickinson. The soul selects its own society, then shuts the door. ‘Noteless’ behind that door, she’s immured against celebrity: ‘I could not bear to live—aloud—/ The Racket shamed me so—’. In this way she would pass nine undisturbed hours, broken only by her sunrise task of waking the household with ‘that shrill morning call’ sleepers were ‘sure to hear’.

To free herself of morning duties, she had to have the backing of her father; his assent was decisive for her future as a poet. A poem of about 1858 has the following dedication:

To my Father -

to whose untiring efforts in my behalf, I am indebted for my morning hours - viz - 3.AM - to 12.PM - these grateful lines are inscribed by his aff[ectionate]

Daughter

To marry would be to lose this freedom to follow her natural rhythm; no husband would have tolerated her timetable as her father did, and soon there would have been babies to fill the hours. The poet Julia Ward Howe found herself silenced by her husband Samuel Gridley Howe after she published Passion-Flowers in 1854. ‘The Heart’s Astronomy’ reveals a wife’s affinity for a ‘comet dire and strange’ as she paces round and round the house, while children smile from its windows. The book made a sensation but Mr Howe was so displeased to hear of ‘wild, erratic natures’ tethered to domesticity (‘Between extremes distraught and rent’) that he delivered an ultimatum: if his wife continued to publish in this vein he would end the marriage and take the children. His threat about her children brought Mrs Howe to heel. From then on she brought out only public verse like ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. When Mrs Howe asked her husband how he could have been so sympathetic to Florence Nightingale, his reply was that had Miss Nightingale been his wife he would not have allowed her to nurse the sick and wounded.

The time came for Susan to face once more the prospect of her wedding to Austin Dickinson. Sue’s postponements of this event over the three years of their engagement did alert Austin to the problem of sexual fear. There’s some evidence that he tried to cross the barrier of silence.

Was she, he put it delicately in a draft letter, ‘troubled by the thought of giving yourself away to me. Does it now, Sue? Does it ever seem to you you could live happier - better - unmarried . . . Is there anything in the . . . relation of wife that gives you sometimes gloomy thoughts - and if there is can I say something that will relieve them’?

His unrealistic offer was that she remain a virgin, ‘if so you are happier - then I will ask nothing of you, take nothing from you - you are not the happier in giving me’. This ‘sacrifice’ he was prepared to make if she would go through with the wedding. ‘Don’t ever be discouraged, Sue, to thinking of “a man’s requirements” - I ask nothing but your love - just the love you are giving me now - and I offer in return all I am - & all I can accomplish - without reserve - without qualifications.’ Sue was sufficiently alert as a reader to have picked up his hope of a wife who is ‘happier’ in giving herself.

The Gilbert brothers sent $6000 towards furnishing the new house with an oak sideboard, Gothic chairs, Victorian paintings and a green marble fireplace adorned with Canova’s Cupid and Psyche.

In the end, after prolonged hesitation but encouraged by Emily and the rest of the Dickinson family, Susan Gilbert married Austin Dickinson on 1 July 1856. Her grave eyes looked out from a bonnet like an inverted basket with festoons of flowers tucked under the brim. Austin stood tall, his brooding stare set off by his flaming locks. It was a quiet wedding, attended by the bride