Emily v. Mabel

• Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds by Lyndall Gordon
  Virago, 491 pp, £9.99, April 2011, ISBN 978 1 84408 453 1
• BuyDickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries by Helen Vendler
  Harvard, 535 pp, £25.95, September 2010, ISBN 978 0 674 04867 6

One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing
Material Place –

‘All men say “What” to me,’ Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She certainly mystified Higginson. He never entirely overcame his uneasiness about her odd, disjunctive words and bewildering epistolary tones and seven years into their correspondence still complained of being unable to get beyond the ‘fiery mist’ in which he said she ‘enshrouded’ herself. She puzzled her brother, Austin. He complained he could not ‘comprehend’ her letters to him and demanded ‘a simpler style’. He thought she ‘posed’. And he was right. She could manage plainness well enough when it suited her. But sometimes plainness did not suit her, and she was mysterious on purpose:

Nature forgot – The Circus reminded her –
Thanks for the Ethiopian Face.
The Orient is in the West.
‘You knew, Oh Egypt’ said the entangled Antony –