Emily Dickinson's niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, asserted that it was on the famous trip to Philadelphia that Emily Dickinson "met" her "fate.'' (Martha Dickinson Bianchi, 1932).
The assumption is that this "fate" is Wadsworth. Many books have been written which promote the idea that the Philadelphia preacher and the unknown Amherst poet maintained some sort of long distance, hopeless affair he was married as well as famous. While many possibilities are conjectured for rendezvous, only two meetings after Emily Dickinson's Philadelphia trip are verified. Wadsworth came to visit Emily Dickinson in 1880, twenty years after his first visit. After years of casual acquaintanceship and letters, this meeting reinforced the idea that here must be the man whose inaccessibility drove Emily Dickinson into seclusion.
There is equal evidence that this was not the case. The idea that there was a man at all is due to the "Master Letters," drafts of three letters (1858, 1861, 1862) written to a man addressed only as "master" with whom Emily Dickinson was deeply in love. The only physical point of description is the man's beard. The pictures of Wadsworth show mutton-chop sideburns but no beard. The existence of the beard has not stopped the artists from many camps from explaining it away in a number of ingenious ways from the letters being a sort of double blind to a metaphorical beard. It seems difficult to know why this sort of concealment would have been necessary or why it would have focused on one hirsute detail. What becomes annoying is that the game of "who was Emily Dickinson's lover" is very infectious, and it is only with great self-discipline that one turns aside from it to move on to, if not more important, at least more documentable matters.
No one seems to have ever listened to Lavinia. She, who lived intimately with her sister and adored her, protested when the storm of speculation about her sister's affairs broke and asserted that Emily Dickinson's withdrawal from the world had been due to no mystery lover but just, as we have seen, "a happen." (Diana Fuss, 1998).
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