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Browning). Otherwise, George Eliot was little known in Amherst for some time. Sue, craving intellectual company beyond the limitations of the town, had the idea of inviting writers and editors to lecture, and in time leading men and women of the day came to the drawing room at The Evergreens: Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Minister’s Wooing; the Revd Henry Ward Beecher; Mrs Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of the children’s books Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden; Thomas Wentworth Higginson who frequently published in the leading cultural magazine, the Atlantic Monthly; Sam Bowles; Dr Josiah Gilbert Holland, assistant to Bowles and quarter-owner of the Springfield Republican; and Helen Hunt, another successful American novelist whom the Dickinsons would have remembered as Helen Fiske from the Amherst of their childhood.

On 16 December 1857 Emerson himself came to lecture on ‘The Beautiful in Rural Life’, and stayed at The Evergreens. It seemed to Emily ‘as if he had come from where dreams are born’.

The later 1850s was a difficult period for Sue. She marked these lines in her copy of Aurora Leigh:

. . . There are fatal days indeed In which the fibrous years have taken root So deeply, that they quiver to their tops When’er you stir the dust of such a day.

While Sue tuned into the voices of unconventional women, including her sister-in-law, Austin gave her The Angel in the House, upholding the selflessness of the ideal wife. ‘Someone has been watching us, Sue,’ was Austin’s inscription for Christmas 1857 - wishful, certainly, but not necessarily deluded, since Sue did pour her talents into domesticity. She created a garden and filled it with choice flowers. Oysters brought from the New England shore awaited Austin’s return from his office in Palmer’s Block. Sue’s food was stylish, while next door at the Homestead the emphasis was on home-grown produce, preserves, puddings and baking - in 1857 Emily won a prize for her Indian bread at a local food fair.

Sue bore her first child in the summer of 1861, so abstinence was certainly at an end by the latter half of 1860. Austin later alleged an attempted abortion, and this is likely: Sue’s horror of childbirth made it a potentially fatal trap she had long tried to avoid. At the time she fell pregnant, she apologised to Emily for seeming to turn away from a kiss.

‘If you have suffered this past Summer - I am sorry - I Emily bear a sorrow that I never uncover - If a nightingale sings with her breast against a thorn,11 why not we?’

This much they told each other of hidden pain, perhaps little more. There’s a hint of reproach for a certain degree of oblivion on Emily’s part. Sue’s part was to encourage the poet’s verbal power, but that power, and the self-absorbed intensity that went with it, was something Sue had to contend with if she was to hold her own. Others before her had felt overpowered, sapped, upstaged, a common experience for those drawn into the force-field of genius. The poet was a brilliant deviser of psychic situations. As prime reader, Sue backed these; still, it seemed to her right that Emily should not neglect to see what Sister did not say about her marriage. Sue might have said - if such things could be said - it was a marriage to Emily’s benefit. Sue might have said that it was a union Emily had urged despite their mutual understanding that marriage was ‘dangerous’. Emily’s word. In 1858 one of her early poems had imagined marriage as an obligatory martyrdom from which the poet is happily exempt:

By such and such an offering

To Mr So and So—

The web of life is woven—

So martyrs albums show!

Once married, Susan was subject - sooner or later - to what used to be called a husband’s rights, and subject also to her father-in-law’s plans. He was legal guardian to four orphaned nieces, daughters of his favourite sister and her husband, a wealthy Brooklyn bookseller called Newman. Initially Mr Dickinson had placed the girls (with a chaperone) in an Amherst house he owned, but at this time he split up the household. The two