Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert

Emily Dickinson’s correspondence with Susan Gilbert pulses with raw passion, blending poetry, longing, and intimacy in letters that scholars call “electric” for their charged emotional voltage. These missives, spanning decades, reveal Dickinson’s deepest attachment to the woman who became her muse, mentor, and “Only Woman in the World.”[1]

A Love Ignited in Amherst

In the summer of 1850, four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson met Susan Huntington Gilbert, nine days her junior and an orphaned mathematician trained at the Utica Female Academy. Susan had moved to Amherst to be near her sister, entering the Dickinson household like a force of nature. Dickinson later recalled that season as “when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens.”[1][2]

Poised and serious, dressed in black for her recently deceased sister, Susan enchanted both Emily and her brother Austin with her erudition and striking features—flat full lips, dark eyes, and an unchiseled oval face that defied easy gender norms.[1] Dickinson captured this bewitchment in verse: “Best Witchcraft is Geometry,” hinting at Susan’s mathematical mind and the triangular tensions it sparked.[1]

What followed was a tempest of intimacy. The women took long walks in the woods, exchanged books, read poetry aloud, and launched a lifelong correspondence. “We are the only poets,” Dickinson told Susan, dismissing everyone else as prose.[1] Even as Susan pursued teaching jobs in Baltimore and the West, their bond endured through the mail, with Dickinson’s letters growing feverish.[2]

Feverish Declarations Across Distance

One letter from early 1852 captures Dickinson’s desperation during Susan’s absence: “Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me… I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait… my heart beats so fast.”[2] She disdained the pen, yearning for a “warmer language.”[2]

In another, crammed with marginalia and upside-down notes, Dickinson poured out fears of unrequited love: “I love you as dearly, Susie, as when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens… it breaks my heart sometimes, because I do not hear from you.”[2] She mourned alone at night, falling asleep in tears, begging: “If it is finished, tell me… but if it lives and beats still, still lives and beats for me, then say me so.”[2]

Dickinson’s pleas intensified: “Oh Susie, I would nestle close to your warm heart, and never hear the wind blow, or the storm beat, again. Is there any room there for me?”[2] She implored simplicity: “Never mind the letter, Susie; you have so much to do; just write me every week one line, and let it be, ‘Emily, I love you,’ and I will be satisfied!”[2]

Nearly two decades later, the fire burned undimmed: “To own a Susan of my own / Is of itself a Bliss — / Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord, / Continue me in this!”[1] Susan coined the term “letter poems” for these chaotic, poetic bursts, which Dickinson sometimes mailed dramatically despite living next door after marrying Austin in 1856.[2]

Intimate Gifts and Siren Songs

Dickinson’s letters brim with sensory details and erotic undercurrents. In June 1852, she enclosed flowers: “they are but small, Susie, and I fear not fragrant now, but they will speak to you of warm hearts at home… Keep them ’neath your pillow, Susie, they will make you dream of blue-skies.”[3] She signed one provocatively: “open me carefully—”[3]

A later “letter poem” from 1876 or after lays bare vulnerability:
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—[3]

This glimpse into their “everyday lives together—even the ugly or petty parts” humanizes the icons.[2] Susan remained Dickinson’s primary reader and editor, their next-door neighborly bond fostering hundreds of poems over four decades.[1][3][5]

Enduring Legacy Amid Controversy

Their relationship, unclassifiable and paradigm-shifting, fueled some of Dickinson’s greatest work. Historians like Rebecca Patterson argue it transcended friendship, citing intense periods from 1859-1862 and queer-coded gestures, such as Dickinson knitting garters for Kate Anthon.[2] Early editors like Mabel Loomis Todd omitted Susan from 1894’s Letters of Emily Dickinson, but modern collections like Open Me Carefully restore her centrality.[3]

While Dickinson’s “Master Letters” and flirtations with Judge Otis Lord add layers to her love life, Susan stands as her fiercest attachment.[4] Today, these electric love letters—besotted, heartbreaking—affirm Dickinson not just as a recluse poet, but a woman alive with desire, her words forever beckoning: Come with me to the church within our hearts.[1]

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Original source: The Marginalian – Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert