dumbfoundry

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.

Open Me Carefully includes, for the most part, only Emily Dickinson's side of this correspondence.  Nearly all of Susan's letters to Emily were destroyed at the time of the poet's death. This would have been the result of a routine "house cleaning," reflecting the common practice in the nineteenth century to either destroy or return to the senders all letters received by the deceased.  That even a handful of Susan's letters to Emily have been preserved, when letters from all other correspondents were irretrievably disposed of, is itself a testament to the vital nature of this correspondence.

This entry was posted by Ivy on Monday, November 01, 2004 at 11:12 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.