Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [44]
She was young and still in the making when she encountered the Brontës’ assent to the hidden alien in women, and discovered in Emily Brontë a poet fixed on ‘infinity’. Left to herself, this was a poet who would have secreted her poems through her lifetime. Fiercely private, she saw the impossibility of spiritual wholeness in a shallow world she shunned; for her, wholeness had an absolute existence beyond life. When a biography eventually appeared in 1883, Dickinson snapped it up at once, finding this life ‘more electric far than anything since “Jane Eyre”’.
At the time when Susan and Emily Dickinson were reading in unison and setting up the next-door habits of their sisterhood, they had a private meeting place at the Homestead: the back serving hall, a dark room with alternative exits through which they could slip at the sound of footsteps. Emily spent many an evening in Sue’s library, with its books and paintings. There was a convenient glass door facing the Homestead through which Emily, lantern in hand, would arrive for evening games of battledore and shuttlecock with Sue and a favourite visitor, Samuel Bowles, the owner of the daily Springfield Republican. He was four years older than Emily and Sue, a hard worker who sometimes went to bed at three in the morning. He had taken over his father’s newspaper at the age of twenty-five, in 1851. Having missed out on college, he liked to report on the annual Amherst commencement - the ‘Gravities’, Emily joked. She was unimpressed with professors who lost themselves in ‘wherefores’. She and Sue preferred a man like Bowles with his hands on the ropes. Bearded, bright of eye, he liked the company of intelligent women and often printed women’s poems.
One evening in January 1859 a young widow in mourning sat beside the fire - ‘the Maid in black’, said Emily. The visitor was Kate Scott Turner from Cooperstown in upstate New York. She and Sue had met at the Utica Female Seminary. Kate warmed to the rarity of Emily’s character as she improvised at the piano.
‘My heart votes for you,’ Emily told her. She was ‘Condor Kate’, an habituée of distant crags. Here was another candidate for a secret society of outsiders and pilgrim souls. Kate was to be amongst ‘my girls’ who anticipate the March sisters in Little Women in playing Pilgrims - only these girls, as Emily conceives them, take their way outside society: ‘All we are strangers - dear - The world is not acquainted with us, because we are not acquainted with her.’ In such company, Emily’s secret self could emerge. ‘I am pleasantly located in the deep sea,’ she said, ‘but love will row you out if her hands are strong, and don’t wait till I land, for I’m going ashore on the other side -’. Kate, like Sue, was invited to follow the poet’s voyage out to eternity, leaving the safer shores of society behind.
‘Those were unnatural evenings,’ Emily thought after Kate had gone, ‘Bliss is unnatural.’ She knitted Kate a pair of garters and sent them with a humorous verse: ‘. . . When Katie kneels, their loving hands still clasp her pious knee—/ Ah! Katie! Smile at Fortune, with two so knit to thee!’
Sue used her new home to set up a salon. One member refused to read Adam Bede (1859) on hearing of its author’s ungodliness. Defiantly, Sue bought the novel for Emily in 1860 and then both bought copies of the newly published Mill on the Floss. Sam Bowles stoked this enthusiasm by giving Sue these two novels as well as the earlier Scenes of Clerical Life. Emily put a picture of George Eliot on the wall of her room (along with Elizabeth Barrett