Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [43]
They named the house for the spruce and pine around it. It was the most stylish house in town, one of the earliest examples of Italianate domestic architecture and the first to install built-in closets on either side of the front door and a bell-pull in the library. The steps of the front path lead up to a square tower and the height of the hall is dramatic, looking up through two storeys. Here Sue welcomed visitors. Her hospitality flowered, making The Evergreens a centre of social life in Amherst. Across the hall was the library, looking out towards the Homestead.
It did not take long for the back path to be trodden into the grass between the two houses as private communications between Emily and Sue raced back and forth. Books were part of their exchange. Sue was quick to acquire Aurora Leigh, the novel-poem in the first person by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, published in 1857. Its heroine is a poet who defies the triviality of women’s lives and takes her domestic way into the larger issues of existence. Aurora Leigh playfully makes herself a poet’s crown, a signal of possibility to Emily Dickinson who plays queen in later poems.10
Sue and Emily read this keenly, and one of them has marked ‘the burning lava of a song’. A double line picks out the need for candour above all: ‘if we say a true word, instantly / We feel ’tis God’s, not ours, and pass it on . . .’. When Robert Browning met Elizabeth Barrett, he had admired an emotional candour he could not, he said, bring himself to risk. A Dickinson poem of this time, ‘I think I was enchanted / When first a sombre Girl—’, celebrates a ‘Foreign Lady’ who opens up possibilities for a woman poet. Dickinson marks a ‘change’ tantamount to ‘Conversion of the Mind’. From then ‘The Days—to Mighty Metres stept—’.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a poet whose voice had reached a wide public from her sickbed. Her success, turning seclusion to advantage, may have served as a model for the way of life Dickinson would devise for herself as poet. Her hair, cut in 1851 and again in 1853, was long again and she began to wear it parted behind and looped over her ears in the style of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Vinnie followed suit, folding the two ends of her abundant tresses into a bow-knot at the back.
During the unmarked year of 1857, a year that has left no trace apart from books, certain reclusive voices of authentic womanhood and spiritual trial converged on Emily. Sue gave her an 1857 reprint of The Imitation of Christ by the fifteenth-century mystic Thomas à Kempis, and in the same year Sue bought Charlotte Brontë’s first novel, The Professor, published posthumously. The following year Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall joined the Dickinson collection, together with Emily’s dark-brown copy of Wuthering Heights. That year, too, Emily gave Mrs Gaskell’s new Life of Charlotte Brontë to Sue, inscribed ‘Sister, from Sister’, while Sue gave Emily a copy of Villette, where the buried fire of Lucy Snowe encounters the blazing fire of the actress Vashti, modelled on the actress Rachel whose explosive performance had thrilled and shocked Charlotte Brontë in London, as Mrs Gaskell relates. It was fitting that another of Sue’s gifts to the burgeoning poet was Rachel’s Memoirs, published in New York in 1858. In this period after Charlotte Brontë’s death Emily Dickinson thought of the moss creeping over her grave,
The little cage of ‘Currer Bell’
In quiet ‘Haworth’ laid.
She imagines her ‘returning’ - the continued existence of this rare bird in the unseen space:
. . . not in all the nests I meet—
Can Nightingale been seen—
At some stage Dickinson acquired a rare copy of the first edition of the Brontë sisters’ poems published privately (at Charlotte’s instigation) in 1846, when Emily Dickinson had been a schoolgirl of fifteen. Here she would have come upon Emily