A Heart in Port : I NEVER CAME TO YOU IN WHITE.<i> By Judith Farr (Houghton Mifflin: $21.95, 225 pp.)</i>

Emily Dickinson’s incandescence was so frailly encased that she came to shun all handling by others, whether physical, social, moral or artistic. Her fire was too hot and her fire wall too thin to let her deal with the expectations that her New England world imposed on a woman--even a woman poet, even a woman poet sheltered in an unconventional and tolerant household.

Her younger sister Lavinia, fierce and screechy-voiced, was her go-between in much of the practical business of life. When Lavinia was 5--so she is made to relate in Judith Farr’s epistolary novel, “I Never Came to You in White”--the 7-year-old Emily would rouse her with: “Vinnie, get up now. In the matter of raiment you are greatly necessary to me.” For years, the child Vinnie confused raiment with ray; she was delighted to be a ray of Emily’s shining.

Vinnie stayed thin to model Emily’s clothes, thus sparing her sister the dressmaker’s touch. Not that Emily was averse to touch; in Farr’s novel she is more than spiritually passionate, and there are passages--based on suggestive if not conclusive historical evidence--that allude to sexual contact with at least one woman and one man. But the touch had to be meaningful, a touch she sought.

When the doctor was called, he was made to sit down in a parlor while Emily walked back and forth outside the doorway. (Mumps were all you could diagnose that way, he protested.) Those doorway flashings were equivalent to her poetry: all astonishing entrances, no staying for even a moment. Dashes bar the reader from reaching out to detain the abrupt images or bind them with a longer thought. Dickinson would not be handled, she would not be detained.

Farr’s beautifully sensed and crafted story gives us the Dickinson of the dashes. She does not handle or detain her or attempt to pierce the reclusiveness the poet adopted for most of her life. Instead, she seizes on an earlier time--the stormy year Emily spent at a boarding school--to suggest the molten passion and cold defense of her art that reclusion would later come to protect.

For her story, Farr devises letters (with light borrowings from the real correspondence) exchanged among Emily’s relatives, schoolmates, teachers and Emily. She uses parts of several Dickinson poems and invents scraps of others that her fictional protagonist might have jotted down. She is a resourceful stylist who, having devoured the poetry, gives us lines we can imagine the poet weighing, discarding, improving.

The real Emily did attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (later Mount Holyoke College), was unhappy and in poor health and returned after a year or so to her father’s house in Amherst. Farr elaborates.

Her Emily, besotted with words and driven by an idiosyncratic pagan vision of the visible and invisible worlds, rebels against her teachers’ abstract evangelical piety. They are scandalized and the scandal is augmented--and immediately hushed up--when Emily’s passion for Susan Huntington Gilbert, later to marry Emily’s brother Austen, leads to a nighttime rendezvous.

Both the portrait of Emily at school and the account of what happened there are fractured. Each of Farr’s correspondents has a version or partial version. Each version--diverging, converging, contradicting--is shaped by the writer’s interest and need, but above all by panic and denial. The slight-built, dreamy-mannered schoolgirl jolts and sears them all; like lightning-struck metal, ungrounded, they remain charged.

Most lethally charged is her English teacher, Margaret Mann, who corresponds years later with Thomas Higginson, co-editor of the first collection of Dickinson’s poetry. Mann’s initial letters are relatively calm; bit by bit they grow unhinged.

This proper Quaker woman who taught literature as an aspect of religious morality--the Bible was best, Milton was acceptable, Shakespeare was suspect--understood Emily’s ecstatic love of words and her veiled sensuality all too well. By the end of the correspondence, she rants furiously about visiting the poet’s grave to kick dirt on it and gives a lurid account of Emily and Susan “avidly” kissing.

In a way, she is closer to Emily than Higginson, who turns back Mann’s fulminations with a sunny defense of the poet and the poetry: genius without tears--or darkness. Yet Farr infuses his blandness with a hint of panic, firmly repressed. She evokes complexities in all of the correspondents; the suspense in her novel comes from seeing them reveal by hiding, and vice versa.

The headmistress, Miss Lyons, held in awe as the school’s unbending religious authority, reveals a surprising tenderness. She knows what poetry is and responds to it, even though her role is to distrust it. Her letters ache with sympathy for Emily’s erotic as well as poetic passions; Miss Lyons, in fact, is writing to a lesbian former lover. It would be easy to make her a hypocrite, but she shows herself suffering and compassionate. And yet, her forbearance may also have to do with the school’s need of money and the fact that Emily’s father is a generous patron.

A conventional roommate turns out to be the most honest of the correspondents. Emily’s odd ways annoy her but, as she writes, “I do like her some,” and she makes good-hearted, obtuse efforts to get her to conform.

Susan is scary. She rejects Emily’s love letters and professes not to understand their sexual allusions, while greedily keeping their rendezvous. She is a liar and a user; later, as Austen’s wife and head of the household, she will treat her sister-in-law coldly while claiming to have shaped her poems. Yet Lavinia, who detested Susan, writes of her washing and dressing Emily’s corpse and weeping convulsively behind a closed door.

Emily’s own letters are unbounded and unguarded. They are the letters of a heretic maintaining her creed against the evangelical correctness of her teachers, who are shocked to hear her praise the Bible for the beauty of its words. She, like the devil Margaret Mann supposes her to be, can quote Scripture for her own purpose: John’s “the Word was God.” Her god--she writes to him like a lover and addresses him as “Mysterious Person”--is the muse of her poetry.

Farr’s slice of Dickinson’s life is a fictional hypothesis, though based on scholarly work. The figure suggested by the letters is an inspired intuition of what it could have felt like to be Emily and what it could have felt like to encounter her: difficult--perhaps reclusion was a two-way safeguard. “They could devour the soul right out of your body,” Susan writes, years later, of the Dickinsons, Emily and Austen.

Above all, Farr’s portrait of Emily is entirely congruent with the poetry. Her method--each of its own dashes a twig obstructing a hill stream and sending up geysers of spray--confronts us with both a tangible figure and a mystery that remains untouched and unspoiled. Like the poems, Farr’s story is present and elusive.