Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [78]
Egypt, thou knew’st too well,
My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings,
And thou shouldst tow me after. O’er my spirit
Thy full supremacy thou knew’st, and that
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
Command me.
In later years, Emily entered into a different kind of friendship, the result of her circulating manuscripts. From about 1866 Higginson was copying and passing on Dickinson poems to Helen Hunt, who was, at the time, regarded as the foremost woman poet in America. She was the same age as Dickinson and had grown up in Amherst, the Helen Fiske whose mother had died while her daughters were at school. Helen remembered Emily at Amherst Academy, but recalled Vinnie more clearly as a playmate of her younger sister Ann. As a young married woman living in Washington DC, Helen Hunt had avoided calling on the Dickinson sisters when they’d visited their father in 1855. Vinnie had appeared to her merely a ‘fat little country lassie’. Then, on a visit to Amherst in 1860, Helen, together with her husband Major Hunt, had attended a reception at the Homestead. Emily told Higginson that she thought Mrs Hunt’s verses better than any by a woman bar Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mrs Lewes (as George Eliot was known).
Mrs Hunt, in turn, admired Dickinson’s poems and all the more for what she took to be the propriety of modest retirement. She herself published behind the ‘shelter’ of her initials in ‘the crowded obscurity of print’ and she refused to speak in public. Yet even as she abjured publicity, she was not unaware of ‘H.H.’ as a brand. As with other successful women writers - Mrs Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Constance Fenimore Woolson (great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper) - ambition and retirement co-existed. All held off from public women demanding rights and suffrage: Brontë thought Harriet Taylor Mill manifested a heart of leather in her 1851 essay ‘The Emancipation of Women’; Helen Hunt satirised American feminist leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in ‘Good-by, Leather Stockings!’; while Dickinson ‘avoided’ the feminist writer Harriet Prescott Spofford. Domestic values drew Helen Hunt and Emily Dickinson to each other. Like an earlier vindicator of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Hunt stood for the values of home - the domestic affections, nurture, listening, justness - as the right levers to ‘move the whole world’.
Some twelve years after Helen was widowed, she married a Mr Jackson of Colorado. Emily tossed off a monosyllable of joy, followed by a three-line verse muttering obscurely about ‘doom’. The bride made bold to return the verse for explanation. None was forthcoming, but after a while Dickinson threw out a lasso to Mrs Jackson who, she said, had ‘averted’ her head. Not a bit, came Helen Jackson’s reply; she had merely neglected to write while setting up home in Colorado Springs. Emily was touchy about friends who married, expecting neglect. Helen Jackson made it plain that she expected their friendship to go on as before and pressed her friend to publish - the only creative writer at the time to recognise Dickinson’s genius.
When Higginson came face to face with Dickinson for the second and last time, in 1873, he asked her how she coped with lack of occupation, day by day within the same walls. She was astonished and gave him to understand that such a question had never occurred to her. Though by then Higginson had corresponded with her for twelve years and read a good many of her poems, he was unaware that her inward life was so active, and her attention to events of nature so constant, that she felt no lack of occupation. She gardened, kept a flourishing conservatory, made the household bread since her father preferred hers and, then too,