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It should have been exciting, but Higginson was trying to reach her through everyday talk. Not easy, especially as he sensed that questions might make her withdraw. She, for her part, had no qualms. Without his touching her she drew from him, noting with concern how he tired.

‘Gratitude is the only secret that cannot reveal itself,’ was her parting flourish. Why complicate thanks with this insistence on her secret? It seems of a piece with her wish and refusal to ‘tell’. Poor Higginson was baffled. She had said a lot of strange things, from which he deduced an ‘abnormal’ life. He left relieved not to live near her.

It’s obvious from this meeting why Dickinson found it preferable to communicate through letters and letter-poems. The question of contacts has intrigued later generations of readers. Who was being trained in her unique mode of communication? Who provoked her to further communication? Susan Dickinson above all: more than a friend of her youth, more than the sister she became, she remained a prime reader throughout the thirty years of the poet’s output. Sue, she said, looking back from their fifties, had shared the sense of ‘Infinity’; had been infinity. An initiation in infinitude was the gift Dickinson offered to the few she admitted to intimacy. Contrary to the usual view that people changed her, it was she who operated on others for the brief periods they could bear it. She created certain people in the same way as she created her poems, many of which function as letters and, in fact, were enclosed in letters as extensions of them. She half-found, half-invented a receptive reader in Susan Dickinson, ‘Only Woman in the World’, to whom she sent more than twice the number of poems sent to anyone else. In a similar way she half-found, half-invented the man she called ‘Master’.

The existence of an alternative audience prompts questions. One is whether certain members of her chosen audience fell short: did Bowles, for example, fail her when he preferred sentimental tosh and when his paper conventionalised the few poems that he published? Did Susan fail her when she advised Dickinson to cut the second stanza of ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers’? This is a poem about the lifelessly obedient who will lie unrisen, for ever, in their graves. Susan’s instinctive move closer to the fire was a humorous response to the chilling subject. Though she failed to see that the wheeling, oblivious universe in the second stanza is integral to this definition of death, Susan responded with eloquence and warmth:

I am not suited dear Emily with the second verse - It is remarkable as the chain lightening that blinds us hot nights in the Southern sky but . . . it just occurs to me that the first verse is complete in itself . . . You never made a peer for that verse . . . The flowers [Emily sent] . . . look as if they would kiss one - ah, they expect a humming-bird - Thanks for them of course - and not thanks only[,] recognition sister . . .

Susan is tired making bibs for her bird [her son] - her ring-dove - he will paint my cheeks when I am old to pay me -

Sue -

Susan isn’t Emily’s hummingbird now. She’s a mother. It must have disappointed the poet to find Sister’s attention straying to her baby ring-dove. And what made Dickinson say that Katie ‘betrayed’ their love? Was it simply that Kate remarried in 1866, when their friendship seems to have ended? Ten years on she lamented that loss in a poem which admits ‘Treason’ on her own side: she closes her door to this friend, as to others, unable to speak of her sickness. This is an unsent letter-poem, signed ‘Emily’, written when Katie was visiting Amherst in 1877:

I shall not murmur if at last

The ones I loved below

Permission have to understand

For what I shunned them so—

Divulging it would rest my Heart

But it would ravage theirs—

Why, Katie, Treason has a Voice—

But mine—dispels—in Tears.

With Susan there were renewals and entrancing affirmations. ‘Rare to the Rare -’, Emily addressed her in 1869. At forty, custom could not stale this neighbour. ‘To see you