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eldest were placed with another member of the Dickinson family, while the two younger girls, Clarissa (Clara) and Anna, aged sixteen and about twelve, he placed with Sue and Austin. As guardian, Mr Dickinson had borrowed about $6000 from his late brother-in-law’s estate, which was the amount it cost to build The Evergreens. He could have justified this as providing a home for his wards. They did not settle well. It’s possible that they vented on Sue some resentment at Mr Dickinson’s borrowing from their inheritance to build his son’s home.

So it happened that two dressy girls from Brooklyn were living with Susan within a year of her marriage. At only twenty-seven, Sue had to put up with their mulish faces and the prospect of their company day and night for the foreseeable future. At the Homestead the girls would have been an intrusion, to judge from Emily’s impatience with Cousin Pliny Dickinson of Syracuse and his two daughters, who stayed only a few days: ‘Fortunate for us indeed that his business feels the need for him, or I think he would never go.’ She thought Clara and Anna pleasant enough but ‘not like us’. It appears that Mr Dickinson protected the privacy of his household at Sue’s expense. There was friction with the girls, who later complained of Sue while retaining respect for Mr Dickinson. Susan signed her maiden name in a copy of Goethe published three years after her marriage. To herself she was still ‘S. H. Gilbert’.

This is the secret sharer who urged Emily Dickinson on as she swims away from land towards the deep sea of her solitude. In 1858, the year the poet began to save selected poems in home-made booklets, she celebrates Sue in a sister-poem and sent it to her, most likely on Sue’s twenty-eighth birthday. It was amongst the first of the 276 poems that would follow across the grass between the two houses:

One Sister have I in our house—

And one, a hedge away.

There’s only one recorded,

But both belong to me.

One came the road I came—

And wore my last year’s gown—

The other, as a bird her nest,

Builded our hearts among.

She did not sing as we did—

It was a different tune—

Herself to her a music

As Bumble bee of June.

Today is far from Childhood—

But up and down the hills

I held her hand the tighter—

Which shortened all the miles—. . .

Their tie is not unmarred. The poet owns, ‘I spilt the dew—/ But took the morn’. ‘Spilt’ and ‘took’: the monosyllabic verbs are hard, wilful. The speaker has no compunction about appropriating her Sister’s freshness. Yet this acquired Sister is no weakling: she keeps up her ‘hum’ and brings back the ‘Violets’ - the old fragrance of mutual feeling that, to tell the truth, has ‘mouldered’ for some years. For a poet in the making it’s more than enough, a family circle in adjoining houses and a guiding star for what she is to ‘do’:

. . . I chose this single star

From out the wide night’s numbers—

Sue—forevermore!

Sue’s two reminiscences of family and Amherst life show a flair for memoir. She had a humorous eye for detail. Where Emily Dickinson soars into luminosity, Sue sees other people. Over the course of the 1850s she had the intelligence to see Emily Dickinson. It was Sue’s extraordinary fortune to encounter a mind of this calibre; it was her misfortune to have it possess and shape her fate, for Sue’s marriage was in part the work of Austin’s sister. Nothing in Emily’s poems and letters to Sue suggests that she might be other than the one who offers the rum - the choice ‘Domingo’ - to intoxicate ‘the little tippler’ of a poet. Dickinson’s poems to Sue are shot through with rum and heat brought home from a West Indian island of the imagination.

There’s a strange exception to the poems sent across the grass: a more possessive poem to ‘Dollie’ (Sue), which Dickinson kept to herself. Dollie is called to join the poet in her grave. It’s a call from beyond the poet’s life-time, reaching out for Dollie in a way that’s all the creepier for Dollie’s assent to the poet’s power to ‘take’:

. . . Trust the loving promise

Underneath the mould,

Cry