I saw the movie "Becoming Jane" last week. It is a romance, based, very loosely, on Jane Austin's life, and in particular a sentence in one of her letters to her sister, saying that she had flirted with a Mr. Lefroy at a party. The movie got a lot of things just right - her father the country parson - her dashing brother who married cousin Philadelphia (whose first husband lost his head to the guillotine in France) - Jane's lively wit.
As for the romance between Jane and Mr. Lefroy - well, all the romantics in the theater wished it were true. Jane Austin wrote the most wonderful love stories and we all wanted to think that she had once experienced a passion of her own. But Jane Austin never married. She was very briefly engaged, but called it off, choosing to remain single rather than marry without love.
Another wonderful writer who never married is the poet, Emily Dickinson. There are rumors of an unrequited love for a married man, but no one really knows, and no one believes there was anything physical between them. However, there are tantalizing hints of passion in her writing that give one pause.
The following poems are by or about Emily, but are for Jane as well.
Emily Dickinson
Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.
Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!
Billy Collins
Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.
And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.
Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.
You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.
The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.
Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything—
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.
What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.
So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset
and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that Reason is a plank,
that Life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.
