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"A Piercing Virtue": Emily Dickinson in Margaret Drabble's The Waterfall

The sense of working within a tradition is part of what the woman writer must have to establish that sense of individuality and autonomy that is necessary to create art. If, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar tell us, "the creative ÎŠ AM' cannot be uttered if the T knows not what it is" (17), then part of the way the "I" defines itself is through its identification with other, similar "I"s. Understanding women's influence on women, Elaine Showalter tells us, "shows how the female tradition can be a positive source of strength and solidarity as well as a negative source of powerlessness; it can generate its own experiences and symbols which are not simply the obverse of the male tradition" (11). The experiences and the symbols of women's literature have been shared by women authors across centuries. Emily Dickinson only listened in on this conversation among the women authors of her century; although she read George Eliot, the Brontes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, they knew nothing of her. In the twentieth century, however, her importance is