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By Root 633 0

twenty dressed in black for a sister who had died from childbirth the previous month. For an orphan who missed her mother and, still more, the dearest and most protective of her sisters who had replaced her mother, a promise of reunion in the afterlife was an answer to loss. Edward Dickinson, kneeling in the same group and unaccustomed to public shows of emotion - he was reserved even within his family - was struck by the girl’s seriousness and the grace of her words. So it was that when Austin cast his lofty eye on Susan Gilbert his father not only approved, he positively wished for the match. So did all the family, including self-effacing Mrs Dickinson, her vehement elder daughter Emily and her second daughter, Lavinia, to the extent of closing in on Susan with insistent persuasions.

‘Susie - we all love you - Mother - Vinnie - me. Dearly !’ Emily urged, her insistence quite as heated as Austin’s.

Emily Dickinson had a reason of her own for drawing Susan into her family: she was a discerning reader. ‘With the exception of Shakespeare, you have told me of more knowledge than any one living’, she told Susan later. ‘To say that sincerely is strange praise.’ A poet in the making, she befriended Susan as her fellow reader and other self.

‘I want to think of you each hour in the day,’ Emily pressed her. ‘You say you walk and sew alone. I walk and sew alone.’

If she could have painted her feelings, ‘the scene should be - solitude, and the figures - solitude - and the lights and shades, each a solitude. I could fill a chamber with landscapes so lone, men should pause and weep there . . .’. In her fantasy, she and this most necessary friend would walk invisible, ‘seeing yet unseen’.

In contact with Susan - a ‘Sister’ married, eventually, to her brother and settled next door - Emily Dickinson fired a poetic voice ‘at the White Heat’. Susan met this rarity with her own ‘torrid spirit’, hot enough for the poet to dub her ‘Domingo’, as stimulating as rum for a poet intoxicated with words. Excitement was mutual. Next door, at The Evergreens, Susan read Sister’s poems aloud to the public men of Boston or Springfield - the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, it might be, or Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, a newspaper admired for its independent editorials - when they chanced to stop over in the staid college town.

So it went on for twenty-five years, with two families in adjoining houses: the quiet, old-fashioned Homestead of the elder Mr Dickinson, his wife and two daughters; and the vibrant, much-visited home of Austin, Susan, and their children. From the late 1850s The Evergreens functioned as the prime outlet for Emily Dickinson, home to her poetic eruptions. Letters and poems (some with Sue as subject) took the path trodden by the two women’s feet between the houses, and Sue was the sole member of family to take the temperature of Emily’s venture. Brainy, curtailed Maggie Tulliver reads avidly, and Sue’s wants were Maggie’s wants: books with ‘more’ in them. As a reading partner, Sue was on intimate terms with George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Brontës. As such, ‘Sister’ could speak to a secret self bent on immortality.

It’s known that she shut herself in her father’s house and that she eventually produced 1789 poems, most of them secreted in that locked chest of drawers. On the face of it, her life seems uneventful and largely invisible, but a forceful, even overwhelming character stirred below her still surface. She called it a ‘still—Volcano—Life’, and that volcano heaves, close to the surface, throughout her poetry and a thousand letters. Stillness, for her, was not a retreat from life but a form of control. Far from the helplessness she played up at times, she controlled her dramas, taking on the head of her college, other strong women and men who were leaders in the publishing and legal worlds. But there came a time when this control was threatened by a young woman who admired her poems and offered to sing for her delectation.

Once The Evergreens and then the Homestead opened their doors