Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson December 10, —May 15, met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest — an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior.
I devote more than one hundred pages of Figuring to their beautiful, heartbreaking, unclassifiable relationship that fomented some of the greatest, most original and paradigm-shifting poetry humanity has ever produced. This essay is drawn from my book. Susan Gilbert had settled in Amherst, to be near her sister, after graduating from the Utica Female Academy — one of a handful of academically rigorous educational institutions available to women at the time.
Sister and brother alike were taken with her poised erudition and her Uranian handsomeness — her flat, full lips and dark eyes were not exactly masculine, her unchiseled oval face and low forehead not exactly feminine. Now both she and her brother found themselves in a strange bewitchment of figures, placing Susan at one point of a triangle.
Nearly two decades after Susan entered her heart, she would write with unblunted desire:. The two young women took long walks in the woods together, exchanged books, read poetry to each other, and commenced an intense, intimate correspondence that would evolve and permute but would last a life- time. Come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing, and the preacher whose name is Love — shall intercede for us! When Susan accepted a ten-month appointment as a math teacher in Baltimore in the autumn of , Emily was devastated at the separation, but tried to keep a buoyant heart.
Will you be kind to me, Susie? I sit here with my little whip, cracking the time away, till not an hour is left of it — then you are here!
