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have had nowhere else to go after she returned from her boarding school in New Haven. And Susan’s daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, who was an unreliable narrator in anything to do with her aunt, still understood the merciless repertoire of every single Amherst belle:“between the abrupt ending of school routine and the fatal hour of marriage there was for every girl a chasm to be filled in.”
    Emily Norcross was a farm girl, not the daughter of an Amherst squire; she must have cleaned and scrubbed from the age of ten. And she had to grow up with all the fears and mystery that surrounded childbirth; so few children survived that they often weren’t given a proper name until they reached the age of one. Austin and Susan’s firstborn wasn’t given a name at birth; soon he was called “Jacky,” until he survived six months and now had an official name, Edward, or Ned.
    There was no anesthetic; childbirth was not only dangerous, it was also filled with shame; a male doctor, rather than a midwife, poked around in your waters. He delivered your child with medieval instruments and his own bloody hands. Women often went from pregnancy to pregnancy, with little time to recover; but being pregnant didn’t deliver them from their chores. We have to imagine Emily Sr. in her isolation at the widow Montague’s, or at the mansion on MainStreet, with Lucretia Gunn Dickinson as the real mistress of the house. Edward was seldom there; he was part of the fire brigade and would soon be running for public office. Little Emily must have felt her mother’s loneliness; she was like a primitive Geiger counter, “a Goblin with a Guage” [Fr425]; that was her particular genius. Soon she had a little sister; Vinnie, named after her own aunt Lavinia, was born on February 28, 1833, at nine o’clock in the morning. But Mrs. Dickinson couldn’t seem quite to recover, and she would never have another child. Vinnie herself was ill for a while. Perhaps it’s why Mrs. Dickinson seemed to favor her.
    When Emily was two and a half, she was sent to stay in Monson with her aunt Lavinia while her own mother and little sister continued to convalesce. We have a remarkable record of the trip in Jay Leyda’s The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, as Lavinia wrote her sister about the various stages of this voyage to Monson. Scholars have picked Lavinia’s letters apart to look for signs of Mrs. Dickinson’s abandonment of her little daughter. But the letters are poignant and funny, and offer our first glimpse of “Elizabeth,” as Aunt Lavinia called Emily Dickinson. She and her little niece left Amherst sometime in the spring of 1833 and found themselves in the middle of a thunderstorm.
    Just after we passed Mr Clapps—it thundered more & the thunder and lightning increased—Elizabeth called it the fire— the time the rain wind and darkness came we were along in those pine woods—the thunder echoed—I will confess that I felt rather bad. . . . We tho’t if we stopped we should not get home      [to Monson] that night—Elizabeth felt inclined to be frightened some—she said “Do take me to my mother” But I covered her face all under my cloack to protect her & took care that she did not get wet much . . .
    On May 9, she wrote to Edward, her brother-in-law, that little Elizabeth had learned to play the piano—“she calls it the moosic .” Later that month, she wrote that Elizabeth was now a perfect little member of thefamily. Joel Norcross was “much amused” by the little girl. And Lavinia now played the perfect aunt. She groomed the little girl, got her “a little gingham apron [and] some new hose .”
    She speaks of her father & mother occasionally & little Austin but does not express a wish to see you—Hope this wont make you feel bad—She is very affectionate & we all love her very much—She