Acts of Sisterly Devotion Behind Austen, Brontes, Millay

THE AUSTENS, the Brontes, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay. What do these women have in common? Other than being fine writers, each has a sister who was the great woman behind her success.

Cassandra Austen

Jane Austen

For Cassandra (1773-1845) and Jane Austen (1775-1817), the only girls of eight siblings, it seems predestined that they would become one another’s best friend and confidante. What is less obvious is why Cassandra, at age 70, burned Jane’s letters, leaving some people with the odd impression that Jane was bland or worse, retiring.

As any sister will tell you, a sister–especially one with some age on her side–protects a sister, and despite the fact that we might like to never forgive the act of the bonfire, we understand the intent. It was Jane, after all, who once said of herself, “If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it.”

Some of this nature is obvious in her novels (Emma, Lady Susan, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Love and Friendship). Maybe Cassandra thought that nature of her famous sister was better left unillustrated by the nonfiction version of things.

Cassandra and Jane

Before the great bonfire, however, it was Cassandra who provided the series of circular illustrations for Jane’s The History of England, the hilarious thing being that the royals never looked so good, nor so much like the Austens, who modeled for the portraits. Cassandra also provided us with the only known portrait made in life of her sister Jane. It can be seen in London’s National Portrait Gallery. When Cassandra chose to burn her sister’s letters, she did, yes, we admit it, shut us off from much-needed biographical material–until the publication of a recent novel, Cassandra and Jane, by Jill Pitkeathley, which attempts to take up where history leaves off.

The Brontes

The Bronte sisters-–Charlotte, Emily and Anne–-were some of the finest writers in the English language. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfeld Hall (1848) astonish us, all these years later. Published under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the work of the sisters drew immediate attention, including the public’s eager desire know the true identity of the authors. Only after the tragic, early deaths of her sisters Emily and Anne, Charlotte revealed the secret–that they were all women, and sisters–in her 1850 Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell, both outing them all and successfully launching the Bronte myth.

Lavinia Dickinson

Across the pond, it was Lavinia “Vinnie” Norcross Dickinson whose devotion to her sister Emily might be the best American sisterlit tale. Given the chance to go back in time, some of us would choose these women to observe, particularly if the trip included a sit in their kitchen, over a plate of Emily’s black cake, and a cup of tea at the Homestead, the Amherst, Massachusetts, the Dickinson home the sisters shared until death.

A novel, appropriately entitled The Sister, written by Paola Kaufman, is a surprising peek from Lavinia’s point of view and begins on the 10th anniversary of Emily’s death. It might make a good place to enter the marvelous world of the Dickinson sisters, though practically every year another biography comes out about the Dickinsons, the most recent being White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple.

Emily Dickinson

Emily, who around the age of 35 stopped venturing out of Amherst, Massachusetts, then stopped leaving home by the time she was 45, instead living a life of domesticity with her sister and housemate, Lavinia. When Emily died at the age of 56, Lavinia put her sister into one of the poet’s now-famous white dresses, and pinned violets on her collar, perhaps thinking that it was their last act together. It was not, for soon Lavinia found hundreds of poems under Emily’s bed, many of them tied into “fascicles” stitched together by Emily’s own hand.

Getting help from Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd (a friend, but also the lover of their brother, Austin), Lavinia edited them and roughly arranged them chronologically. They appeared as Poems, Series 1 in 1890, Poems, Series 2 in 1891, and Poems, Series 3 in 1896. We cannot be too grateful for this act of sisterly devotion.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Like Lavinia before her, Norma Millay Ellis was her sister Edna St. Vincent Millay’s keeper, only this time the caregiving role was mostly posthumous. Upon the poet’s death in 1950, Norma moved onto the property named Steepletop, a 650-acre farm Edna had occupied beginning in 1925. Situated just 60 or so miles to the east of where the Dickinsons once made home, the house sits on a hill in Austerlitz, New York, and is now a National Historic Monument, sharing the property with the Millay Colony for the Arts, which Ellis founded in 1970 while she also worked as custodian for her sister’s publications and papers. Norma lived out her life among her sister’s things until her death in 1986 at the age of 92. Today, the Colony thrives, offering retreats for poets, painters, sculptors, composers and dramatists.–Marion Roach Smith

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