“Open Me Carefully.” Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

Emily Dickinson died in 1886, and her poems were not introduced to the reading public until 1890, when editors Thomas Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd released the first edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson. In the hundred years since that first publication, the story of Emily Dickinson and Susan Huntington Dickinson has only gradually emerged in the annals of Dickinson scholarship. In fact, most readers of Dickinson are unaware of the intense and long-lived relationship that was at the very core of the poet’s emotional and creative life.

Susan Huntington Gilbert and Emily Elizabeth Dickinson were born within days of each other in December 1830. They may have known each other from girlhood; they certainly knew each other from adolescence; and they had begun to correspond by the age of twenty. Their relationship spanned nearly four decades, and for three of those decades, the women were next-door neighbors. Together, Susan and Emily lived through the vicissitudes of a life closely shared: Susan’s courtship, engagement, and eventual marriage to Emily’s brother, Austin; Susan and Austin’s setting up home next door to the Dickinson Homestead; the births of Susan and Austin’s three children, and the tragic death of their youngest son, Gib; anonymous individual publication of at least ten of Dickinson’s poems; and the deaths of parents and many friends.

Though details of Emily and Susan’s relationship were known to their contemporaries, much of the information about the two women has been passed along through sometimes questionable testimony. The strongest testimonies, and the ones that have been most pivotal in determining the presentation of the relationship until now, have been provided by two controversial sources. The first is Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Susan’s daughter and Emily’s niece. Bianchi, who compiled The Single Hound (1914) and dedicated it “as a memorial to the love of these ‘Dear, dead Women,’” then continued to carry out her mother’s plan by presenting extracts from letters in The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924) and Emily Dickinson Face to Face (1932). For various unfair and unfounded reasons, many scholars have characterized Bianchi as an always unreliable source. However, we believe otherwise, and we have cited her comments and observations about Susan and Emily throughout this book.

There was simply no place in the official Dickinson biography for the revelation of an immediate confidante and audience for her poetry—particularly not one who lived next door.

The second source is Mabel Loomis Todd, editor (along with Thomas Higginson) of the first three volumes of Emily’s poems. In her desire to hide Susan’s central role in Dickinson’s writing process, Loomis Todd went to great lengths to suppress any trace of Susan as Emily’s primary audience. Much of the reason for this is obvious: the young Mabel Loomis Todd, born the year Susan and Austin wed, had become Austin’s mistress; she was the “other woman” to Susan’s “wife forgotten.” The affair continued until Austin’s death in 1895 and was quite public, an inexpressibly painful situation for Susan. Loomis Todd made no mention of Susan when she produced the Letters of Emily Dickinson in 1894. There is even evidence in Emily’s letters to Austin that someone, probably Loomis Todd, sought to expunge affectionate references to Susan.

When the Dickinson fascicles were turned over to Mabel Loomis Todd, Susan’s crucial position as primary audience for Emily’s poetry became an inconvenient and irrelevant piece of information that did not jibe with the popular image of a nineteenth-century poetess. To editors of the time, the most marketable image of Dickinson the poet was that of the eccentric, reclusive, asexual woman in white. This mysterious figure necessarily wrote all alone, harboring some “secret sorrow” that no one else could understand or be privy to. There was simply no place in the official Dickinson biography for the revelation of an immediate confidante and audience for her poetry—particularly not one who lived next door. Loomis Todd was therefore willing to play up this “solitary spinster” characterization of Emily Dickinson in her editorial productions, and thus the role of Susan went entirely unmentioned in the earliest publications of Dickinson’s works. Loomis Todd even refused Higginson’s recommendation that Susan’s obituary of Emily (which emphasized that although she kept her own company she was “not disappointed with the world”) serve as the introduction to the 1890 Poems. Instead, Loomis Todd used a three-paragraph introduction by Higginson that proclaimed that Emily was “a recluse by temperament and habit,” and hence the mythology of Emily Dickinson, the “recluse of Amherst,” was cast.

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Friday afternoon –

I have but one thought, Susie, this afternoon of June, and that of you, and I have one prayer, only; dear Susie, that is for you. That you and I in hand as we e’en do in heart, might ramble away as children, among the woods and fields, and forget these many fears, and these sorrowing cares, and each become a child again—I would it were so, Susie, and when I look around me and find myself alone, I sigh for you again; little sigh, and vain sigh, which will not bring you home.

I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider, and dear ones fewer and fewer, every day that you stay away—I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round, and calls for Susie—Friends are too dear to sunder, Oh they are far too few, and how soon they will go away where you and I cannot find them, dont let us forget these things, for their remembrance now will save us many an anguish when it is too late to love them! Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say—my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me; If you were here, and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language—I try to bring you nearer, I chase the weeks away till they are quite departed, and fancy you have come, and I am on my way through the green lane to meet you, and my heart goes scampering so, that I have much ado to bring it back again, and learn it to be patient, till that dear Susie comes. Three weeks—they cant last always, for surely they must go with their little brothers and sisters to their long home in the west!

I shall grow more and more impatient until that dear day comes, for till now, I have only mourned for you; now I begin to hope for you.

Dear Susie, I have tried hard to think what you would love, of something I might send you—I at last saw my little Violets, they begged me to let them go, so here they are—and with them as Instructor, a bit of knightly grass, who also begged the favor to accompany them—they are but small, Susie, and I fear not fragrant now, but they will speak to you of warm hearts at home, and of the something faithful, which “never slumbers nor sleeps”—Keep them ’neath your pillow, Susie, they will make you dream of blue-skies, and home, and the “blessed countrie”! You and I will have an hour with “Edward” and “Ellen Middleton”, sometime when you get home—we must find out if somethings contained therein are true, and if they are, what you and me are coming to!

Now farewell, Susie, and Vinnie sends her love, and mother her’s, and I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there!! Dont let them see, will you Susie?

Emilie—

On fourth page
Why cant I be a Delegate to the great Whig Convention?—dont I know all about Daniel Webster, and the Tariff, and the Law? Then, Susie, I could see you, during a pause in the session—but I dont like this country at all, and I shant stay here any longer! “Delenda est” America, Massachusetts and all!

open me carefully—

June 11, 1852
Emily’s father Edward Dickinson was a delegate to the national Whig convention, which met in Baltimore on June 16, 1852, and he delivered this letter to Susan. “Delenda est” is Latin for “blot out” or “obliterate” or “erase.” Emily fantasizes about returning to childhood, then complains about woman’s lower political and social status in nineteenth-century New England.

Except to Heaven—she is nought.
Except for Angels—lone.
Except to some wide-wandering Bee—
A flower superfluous—blown.

Except for winds—provincial—
Except for Butterflies
Unnoticed as a single dew
That on the Acre lies—

The smallest Housewife in the grass—
Yet take her from the lawn
And somebody has lost the face
That made Existence—Home—

Emily
early 1860s

I showed her Hights
she never saw—
“Would’st climb,” I said?
She said—“Not so”—
“With me—” I said—
With me?
I showed her Secrets—
Morning’s Nest—
The Rope the Nights
were put across—
And now—“Would’st
have me for a Guest”?
She could not find her Yes—

And then, I brake
My life—And Lo,
A Light, for her,
did solemn glow,
The larger, as her
face withdrew—
And could she, further,
“No”?

Emily—
early 1860s

Emily changes the pronouns in another version of this poem, which she included in the fascicles: “He showed me Hights I / never saw—.”

140

To pile like
Thunder to
its’ close
Then crumble
grand away
While Everything
created hid
This—would
be Poetry—

Or Love—the
two coeval come—
We both and
neither prove—
Experience either
and consume—
For None see
God and live—

Emily
1866 or later

Susan copied “None see God and live” into one of her journals.

188

Susan knows
she is a Siren—
and that at a
word from her,
Emily would
forfeit Righteousness—
Please excuse
the grossness
of this Morning—
I was for a
moment disarmed—
This is the
World that opens
and shuts, like
the Eye of the
Wax Doll—

1876 or later

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