Love Letters as Literary Origin Story
Maria Popova's essay on Emily Dickinson's letters to Susan Gilbert is drawn from her book Figuring, and it reads less like literary criticism than like an act of devotion to devotion itself. The piece traces the arc of Dickinson's most consequential relationship -- the one that began in the summer of 1850, when the poet was nineteen, and persisted in various forms until her death thirty-six years later. Popova calls Susan Gilbert Dickinson's "first love" who "remained her greatest," her "muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment."
The letters themselves are extraordinary. They burn with an intensity that makes most contemporary expressions of romantic feeling look anemic by comparison.
The Fever of Separation
When Susan accepted a teaching position in Baltimore in 1851, the ten-month absence transformed Dickinson's letters from intimate to incandescent. The distance seemed to catalyze something in the poet -- a willingness to put on paper what she might never have spoken aloud.
I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider... every day you stay away -- I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round, and calls for Susie.
There is a physicality to Dickinson's longing that resists any effort to reduce it to "romantic friendship," the Victorian euphemism scholars once used to contain relationships like this one. As Susan's return approached, the poet wrote with startling candor about what the anticipation was doing to her body.
I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait, feel that now I must have you -- that the expectation once more to see your face again makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast.
That passage is not metaphorical. It is a woman describing arousal, sleeplessness, and obsessive anticipation with a directness that would be remarkable in any era, let alone mid-nineteenth-century New England.
The Question of God and Guilt
Popova is particularly attentive to the way Dickinson navigated the collision between desire and religious orthodoxy. The poet's invocations of God in these letters are not, Popova argues, expressions of Puritanical shame but challenges to the dogma that would condemn such love. Dickinson herself seems to oscillate between defiance and dread.
Do I repine, is it all murmuring, or am I sad and lone, and cannot, cannot help it? Sometimes when I do feel so, I think it may be wrong, and that God will punish me by taking you away.
This is a fair reading, though it perhaps understates how genuinely frightened Dickinson was. The letters do not read like the work of someone who has resolved the tension between her desire and her culture's prohibitions. They read like someone living inside that tension daily, swinging between euphoria and terror. The bravery is real, but so is the anguish.
Asymmetry and Its Wreckage
The essay's most poignant section deals with what happened when Susan finally returned from Baltimore. Something had shifted. Popova speculates that the escalating intensity of Dickinson's letters may have revealed to Susan that Emily's feelings were "not of a different hue but of a wholly different color -- one that she was constitutionally unable to match."
Dickinson seems to have sensed this asymmetry before it was confirmed. Months before the reunion, she had written with a vulnerability that reads, in retrospect, like bracing for impact.
I would nestle close to your warm heart... Is there any room there for me, or shall I wander away all homeless and alone?
Susan Gilbert married Austin Dickinson the following autumn. The conventional reading is that this was a betrayal. Popova offers a more nuanced interpretation: Susan married Austin "largely to be near Emily." Whether or not that is entirely true, the arrangement that followed was remarkable. The newlyweds moved into a house across the lawn from Emily's, and a worn path soon appeared in the grass between the two homes as the women continued their daily exchange of letters and poems.
Over the next quarter century, 276 known poems traveled between the two houses. Popova observes that many were sent by mail rather than carried by hand across the lawn, and she wonders at the impulse. The formality of an envelope, the deliberate staging of words on paper -- these were acts of literary composition, not casual notes between neighbors.
The Slant Truth of Pronouns
One of the essay's most valuable contributions is its treatment of Dickinson's deliberate manipulation of gender pronouns. The poet routinely referred to herself with masculine language -- "Brother Emily," "boyhood" -- and when she considered publishing her love poems, she changed female pronouns to male ones. She called these "bearded" pronouns.
Amputate my freckled Bosom! Make me bearded like a Man!
This detail complicates any reading of Dickinson that treats the gender of her love objects as settled or straightforward. It also raises a question Popova does not fully address: how much of Dickinson's famous reclusiveness was strategic rather than temperamental. A woman writing poems of this intensity to another woman in the 1850s had good reason to control access to her private life.
What Endured
The relationship lasted, in its various permutations, for the rest of Dickinson's life. Near the end, she wrote to Susan with a tenderness that had outlived its early desperation.
Be Sue -- while I am Emily -- Be next -- what you have ever been -- Infinity.
Susan, for her part, gave Emily a copy of Disraeli's Endymion for Christmas, inscribed "to Emily, Whom not seeing, I still love." That inscription -- its echo of Paul's letter to the Corinthians, its quiet assertion that love does not require proximity or reciprocity to persist -- may be the most revealing thing Susan ever committed to paper about what Emily meant to her.
Popova frames the relationship as the engine of Dickinson's creative output, calling it "the pulse-beat of Dickinson's body of work, which radicalized its era and forever changed the landscape of literature." That is a large claim, and the essay earns it, though a skeptic might note that Dickinson's formal innovations in meter, punctuation, and syntax were not love-dependent. She would have been a radical stylist regardless. What Susan gave her was not technique but subject matter -- and, more importantly, a reason to keep writing when almost no one else was reading.
Bottom Line
Popova's essay is a deeply felt and carefully researched account of Dickinson's most important relationship. Its strength is in the letters themselves, which are presented generously and allowed to speak with their full force. The framing occasionally leans toward reverence where analysis might serve better -- the prose sometimes mirrors Dickinson's intensity rather than examining it from a useful distance. But as an introduction to a love that shaped one of the most important bodies of poetry in the English language, it is compelling and necessary reading. The letters alone are worth the time. They are the work of a mind on fire, writing to the one person who made the burning bearable.