#Open Me Carefully Emily Dickinsons Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

[a-ramblinrose]

JOMP Book Photo Challenge || January 28 || Frosty Window:   I don’t think I’ve ever seen frost on the windows while at home. Please accept a window framed photo instead!

[petaltexturedskies]

Emily Dickinson, from Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

[beskarfiles]

Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson.

[formerlibrarian]

Every day for one week, post the cover of a book you love and tag someone else to do the same.

Day #1 - In honor of Pride Month I choose "Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters To Susan Huntington Dickinson". Edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith

The fact that Emily Dickinson was queer doesn't surprise me at all. What does surprise me is that after her death, Emily Dickinson's sister Lavinia and family friend Mabel Loomis Todd made significant alterations to Emily's poems and letters, including changes to punctuation, titling, and even content. They even omitted entire passages or changed gender in some instances to conform to the prevailing norms and expectations of the era.

Finally, 100+ years after her death the truth is told! She is a gay icon! And it is beautiful!

Tagging: @teenakp if you would like to play along.

[elledelamer]

Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

[iwanthermidnightz]

—Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith

[gothprentiss]

emily dickinson to susan huntington, autumn of 1850 from open me carefully: emily dickinson's intimate letters to susan huntington dickinson, eds. martha nell smith and ellen louise hart

[poetryandthoughtsblog]

Open Me Carefully

Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Edited By Ellen Louise Hart , Martha Nell Smith

For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson's poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet's life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive. "With spare commentary, Smith ... and Hart ... let these letters speak for themselves. Most important, unlike previous editors who altered line breaks to fit their sense of what is poetry or prose, Hart and Smith offer faithful reproductions of the letters' genre-defying form as the words unravel spectacularly down the original page." Renee Tursi, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

[readabook]

By presenting this most passionate and diverse of all of Dickinson’s correspondences, Open Me Carefully relates Emily and Susan’s devotion to one and another and to the craft of poetry. Through all the decades or poems, letters; and letter-poems from Emily to Susan, we are constantly reminded that for these two remarkable women “Poetry” and “Love . . . coeval come.”

—A Note on the Text, from Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith

[song-witch]

“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; for he is very kind to let me write to you, and to give me your sweet letters, but my heart wants more.” - emily dickinson (‘open me carefully’ emily dickinson's intimate letters to susan huntington dickison)

forever yours, •

p.s. hope you have an absolutely amaze-balls day! a poet a day keeps the doctor away!

nonnie, you make my day sm. i hope your day is as lovely as your poems <3

[a-ramblinrose]

- Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson    

[petaltexturedskies]

I shall think of you at sunset, and at sunrise, again; and at noon, and forenoon, and afternoon, and always, and evermore, till this little heart stops beating and is still.

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Susan Huntington featured in Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

[terrainofheartfelt]

The first section 

of Darkness is 

the densest, Dear,

After that, Light 

trembles in —

You asked would 

I remain? 

Irrevocably…

I know no 

other way —

— Emily Dickinson, Letter-poem to Susan Huntington Dickinson, Late November 1883

[adrasteiax]

(...) I often part with things I fancy I have loved, - sometimes to the grave, and sometimes to an oblivion rather bitterer than death (...)

Emily Dickinson, from Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters To Susan Huntington Dickinson

[danaa-scully]

History meme 

[2/7] Relationships: Emily Dickinson and Susan Huntington Gilbert

I am sick today, dear Susie, and have not been to church. There has been a pleasant quiet, in which to think of you, and I have not been sick eno’ that I cannot write to you. 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. [...] I miss you, mourn for you, and walk the Streets alone — often at night, beside, I fall asleep in tears, for you dear face, yet not one word comes back to me from that silent West. [...] — Affy, Emilie —

I have intended to write you Emily to-day but the quiet has not been mine. I send you this, lest I should seem to have turned away from a kiss — If you have suffered this past summer I am sorry I Emily bear a sorrow that I never uncover — — If a nightingale sings with her breast against a thorn, why not we [!] When I can, I shall write — Sue —

Martha Dickinson Bianchi described her mother and her aunt watching and waiting for a few private moments in a day when they could talk, deliver letters face-to-face, and exchange favored reading materials. These exchanges usually took place in the “Northwest Passage”, the back hallway of the Homestead (Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s intimate letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson).

[herbreastisfitforpearls]

About this poem, sent to Sue in the 1850s:

"[T]hough a lament that her gender is female — [the poem] suggests one of Emily Dickinson's tender solutions to love between women. (...) In place of the dangers of diving (heterosexual passion) and the gorgeousness of thrones (aristocratic station), she proposes the simple, unchallenging intimacies of girlish love. She would give Sue a home."

— Judith Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (p. 134)

(Poem source: Hart & Smith, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's intimate letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, p. 91)