Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Though almost unknown and nearly unpublished in her own lifetime, Dickinson has since come to be regarded along with Walt Whitman as one of the two great American poets of the 19th century. Often called reclusive, Dickinson lived nearly her whole life at the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Loves

Dickinson's possible romantic and sexual adventures have been matters of great controversy among her biographers and critics. There is little reliable evidence on which to base a conclusion about the objects of her affection, though Dickinson's passion is made clear by some of her poems and letters. Attention has focussed especially on a group of letters addressed only to "Master" (and so known as the Master letters), in which Dickinson appears to be writing to a male lover; neither the addressee of these letters, nor whether they were sent, has been established.

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For a century following her death, immense efforts were made to speculate about whether any men in her life might once have been her lovers. Dozens of men were suggested, and many biographers have been particularly convinced of the possibility that Dickinson might have been romantically involved with the newspaper publisher Samuel Bowles, or a friend of her father's, Judge Otis Lord. Lord was 18 years older than she, and their possible romantic relationship, if it existed at all, probably did not begin until she was over 50 years old.

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Biographers have also found evidence that Dickinson may have had romantic attachments to women in her younger years, a hypothesis which has grown in popularity. After a possible short-lived romance with Emily Fowler circa 1850, some conjecture that the first major love interest of Dickinson's life was Susan Gilbert, a schoolteacher whom Dickinson fell in love with in 1851 and to whom she wrote numerous love letters. All of Gilbert's replies were burnt by Dickinson's family after Dickinson's death (possibly to conceal her lesbianism), but Dickinson's letters to Gilbert have survived. The following is excerpted from a letter from Dickinson to Gilbert in late April 1852.

Related Topics:
1850 - 1851 - 1852

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::Sweet Hour, blessed Hour, to carry me to you, and to bring you back to me, long enough to snatch one kiss, and whisper Good bye, again.

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::I have thought of it all day, Susie, and I fear of but little else, and when I was gone to meeting it filled my mind so full, I could not find a chink to put the worthy pastor; when he said "Our Heavenly Father," I said "Oh Darling Sue"; when he read the 100th Psalm, I kept saying your precious letter all over to myself, and Susie, when they sang—it would have made you laugh to hear one little voice, piping to the departed. I made up words and kept singing how I loved you, and you had gone, while all the rest of the choir were singing Hallelujahs. I presume nobody heard me, because I sang so small, but it was a kind of a comfort to think I might put them out, singing of you. I a'nt there this afternoon, tho', because I am here, writing a little letter to my dear Sue, and I am very happy. I think of ten weeks—Dear One, and I think of love, and you, and my heart grows full and warm, and my breath stands still. The sun does'nt shine at all, but I can feel a sunshine stealing into my soul and making it all summer, and every thorn, a rose. And I pray that such summer's sun shine on my Absent One, and cause her bird to sing!

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Gilbert married Dickinson's brother Austin Dickinson in 1856, and some think this broke Emily's heart. The correspondence between them ceased for two years, and so few traces have been found of what Emily did during that period that some biographers have speculated that she may have had a nervous breakdown.

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Emily reconciled with Susan Gilbert in 1858 and resumed correspondence with her in a different tone, asking Gilbert to critique her poems, which at this time she began working harder at than ever. Dickinson went on to romance a variety of other women, whose names she summed up thus in a March 1859 letter to one of them, Catherine Scott Turner: "I never missed a Kate before,—Two Sues—Eliza and a Martha, comprehend my girls."

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Another possible argument adduced in support of her love of women is Dickinson's propensity to play with gender signifiers in her letters. She referred to herself in either the text or the signature of many of her letters with various names including "Emily," "Emilie," "Uncle Emily," and "Brother Emily."

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Dickinson died on May 15th, 1886. The cause of death was listed as Bright's disease ( nephritis ).

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