Turns out the raunchiest thing Emily Dickinson ever wrote wasn’t about death… it was her sapphic love letters
Here's a spicy sapphic one from the Queerty archives...
Mark
Next to Sappho, Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous sapphic poets ever to walk the Earth—and somehow there are still people who deny her queer sexuality.
Perhaps that’s the exact reason why Dickinson remains a figure of such passionate interest to us to this day. Was she the original “and they were roommates” meme? Have we gotten her story all wrong? Or have we allowed other peoples’ revisionist histories to get in the way of Dickinson’s true unabashed queerness?
On the anniversary of what would be the poet’s 195th birthday, let’s take a minute to set the record straight—and spill some centuries-old tea while we’re at it.
How about we take this to the next level?
Subscribe to our newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today
If you know of Emily Dickinson at all, you’re aware of her as an em dash-loving poet who rarely left her Amherst home and didn’t get most of her work published until after she’d died. And yes, that’s partly the truth. Dickinson was a reclusive figure in later life who kept her social circle small. But one woman in her life, whom she met in her 20s, remained hidden in plain sight from Dickinson scholars for decades.
I’m talking about Susan Gilbert, who would end up marrying Dickinson’s brother Austin while carrying out a completely separate, but nonetheless passionate and real, Boston marriage with Dickinson. Dickinson lived next to Gilbert and her brother, and according to academic and Dickinson scholar Martha Nell Smith, “the 40-year relationship between Emily and Susan was of a committed lesbian character; that they lived together, if not in the same house, then side by side.”
When Smith wrote a book concerning this theory in the ’90s, it was seen as scandalous. But by the end of the decade, new information came to light that made Smith’s theory more than credible.
When Dickinson died, her brother Austin’s lover Mabel Loomis Todd managed to take up the mantle of Dickinson executor, despite having had no more than a passing acquaintance with the poet. It was Todd, scholars believe, who censored Dickinson’s extent work, crossing out any reference to Susan Gilbert and neutering many of the obvious love poems and letters that Dickinson wrote for her lover.
By 1998, scholars were able to use infrared technology to see exactly what had been crossed out, and a new story took hold. Not only were Gilbert and Dickinson obviously lovers, their letters to each other were just about as explicit as it gets. The collected letters can be read in “Open Me Carefully,” edited by Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart.
[POEM] From “Open Me Carefully” by Emily Dickinson
byu/Blue_Wildflower inPoetry
In these missives, a portrait of a quiet, loving queer life is laid bare. It’s thanks to this groundbreaking publication that we’ve gotten so many sapphic interpretations of Dickinson in the past few years, from Cynthia Nixon in A Quiet Passion to Molly Shannon in Wild Nights with Emily to the unabashedly queer, hilarious Apple TV show Dickinson starring Hailee Steinfeld as the Amherst poet.
And if you want further evidence of just how saucy those letters got, get a load of one note Emily wrote Susan in 1855 when the latter traveled to the West Coast. “I love you as dearly, Susie, as when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens, and it breaks my heart sometimes, because I do not hear from you,” she begins.
The note continues, “I wrote you many days ago — I won’t say many weeks, because it will look sadder so, and then I cannot write — but Susie, it troubles me. I miss you, mourn for you, and walk the Streets alone — often at night, beside, I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face, yet not one word comes back to me from that silent West. If it is finished, tell me, and I will raise the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay one more love in; but if it lives and beats still, still lives and beats for me, then say me so, and I will strike the strings to one more strain of happiness before I die.”
After another short separation during one of Susan’s trips to Baltimore, Dickinson pined:
“Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you… yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me… I shall grow more and more impatient until that dear day comes, for til now, I have only mourned for you; now I begin to hope for you.”
Dickinson also famously wrote that: “To own a Susan of my own
Is of itself a Bliss —
Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,
Continue me in this!”
So essentially, Emily herself wasn’t worried about keeping her grand passion secret, but the keepers of her legacy—including Mabel Loomis Todd—certainly were.
Thankfully, we’re living in an era when Dickinson’s queer legacy can not only be seen plainly, but appreciated for how romantic it was. The poet might not have experienced fame or renown in her lifetime, and she stayed close to home while she lived. But her wild, passionate yearnings on paper have given us some of the best sapphic representation this side of the 21st century. They’re also a perfect compliment to the musical stylings of noted lesbian Lucy Daucus.
Society forced them to live apart, history called them roommates, but we’ll call Dickinson and Gilbert exactly what they were and are: chaotic, randy lesbians who absolutely would have loved “The Ultimatum: Queer Love.”
Related
After he left a racist comment on her Facebook post, she drove three hours to get some Grindr revenge
“A whole new level of f around and find out”
Sign up for the Queerty newsletter to stay on top of the hottest stories in LGBTQ+ entertainment, politics, and culture.
