To the extent that she did later opt for physical isolation, it would be a mistake to read timidity into that choice. As Paul Hetherington, a Dickinson expert and professor of writing at the University of Canberra, notes: ‘The image of her as being a reclusive eccentric overshadows, and skews our reading of her work because it separates her from the mainstream and casts her in the role of perennial bridesmaid, unsuited to a more robust life and always working at the margins”. In fact, he says, holing up in her father’s comfy home gave her licence, in a staunchly patriarchal society, “to speak openly about love, desire and various ideas of devotion in a way countenanced by no other 19th-Century writer. She is in this way perhaps the first truly modern poet in the English language.”

‘Poster girl’

Writer and academic Dr Cassandra Atherton agrees. “Dickinson’s mythology is often misread by scholars and teachers. Far from being trapped in her father’s house, she was a subversive and brilliant poet whose rebellion can be seen in her battle against patriarchal society and its attempted containment of her as an intellectual female.”

Like Bruno and Vega, Atherton was an early convert to Dickinson’s poetry. “Emily Dickinson was my poster girl”, she says of her teen self. She would even go to school dressed in white with her hair parted and pulled back like the poet. “Dickinson was a fierce observer – a role in which I felt cast as a teenager, and she took up themes concerning the importance of self, as well as pain and suffering, love and death, all essential to my experience growing up.” That infatuation hasn’t waned with adulthood – she even owns (and uses) an Emily Dickinson cookie cutter.