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"With the exception of Shakespeare, you have told me of more knowledge than any one living - To say that sincerely is strange praise." Letter from Dickinson to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, about 1882.

With Susan born nine days after Emily on December 19, 1830, about ten miles away from Amherst in Old Deerfield, Massachusetts, and dying May 12, 1913, almost twenty-seven years to the day after Emily, Susan and Emily have been called "nearly twins" by Jean Mudge (93), and indeed they enjoyed many mutual passions--for literature, gardening, recipes, music, nature. Their intense and constant relationship spanned five decades, and the poet sent substantially more writings to Susan than to any other correspondent. According to the surviving documents of Dickinson's writings habits, Susan is the only reader for whom we can document Emily changed a poem.

The youngest of six children born to Thomas and Harriet Arms Gilbert, Susan was orphaned by age 11 -- her mother dying in 1837 and her father in 1841. From then until the late 1840s, when she came to live in Amherst with her sister Harriet and brother-in-law William Cutler, Susan was reared by her aunt, Sophia Arms Van Vranken, in Geneva, New York, where she attended Utica Female Academy. After teaching mathematics at a private school in Baltimore, she became engaged to Austin Dickinson in 1853; they married 1 July 1856 in a simple ceremony at the Van Vranken home. Though the young couple contemplated moving to Michigan, where Susan's older brothers lived, Edward Dickinson insured their never leaving Amherst by making Austin a law partner and by building them the Evergreens on a lot next door to the Homestead, and a generous dowry from her brothers helped to make their home a showcase in its furnishings and art. Susan and Austin had three children: Edward, Martha, and Thomas Gilbert, but both sons preceded her in death.

Variously praised and disparaged by Dickinson's biographers and critics, Susan was affectionately called "Dolly" by the poet and with unfailing admiration characterized as an "Avalanche of Sun," (H B188; L 755), a "breath from Gibraltar" uttering "impregnable syllables" (H B89; L 722), even "Imagination" itself (H B51; L 855), whose words were of "Silver genealogy" (H B134; L 913). Susan and Emily Dickinson's 40-year relationship has by all accounts been seen as one of crucial importance, even by those who seem intent on calling Susan's character into question. A powerfully intellectual, vivacious, charismatic, sometimes arrogant, often generous, acutely and astutely well-read woman and devoted mother, Susan Dickinson, her life stories, and their meanings for Emily Dickinson almost inevitably became sites of contestation in a culture with limited storylines for women.

Yet what is most important about Susan Dickinson's decades-long involvement with Emily Dickinson is what can be learned from Susan's writing and reading about the compositional, epistolary, and poetic practices Emily knew, participated in, and appropriated for her own art. Dickinson herself characterized their relationship in literary terms--comparing her love for Susan to Dante's love for Beatrice and Swift's for Stella (H B95; L 393), and comparing her tutelage with Susan to one with Shakespeare (L 757). Clearly, she valued Sue's opinions about writing and reading, and both women shared an affective theory of poetry evident when one compares Sue's response to "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers"--"I always go to the fire and get warm after thinking of it, but I never can again" with Emily's comment to Higginson on poetics "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. . ." (P 216; L 342a).

In a December 1890 letter to Higginson, Susan compared her relationship with Emily and the lifetime of writing exchanged between them to that recorded in Goethe's Correspondence with a Child, the intense dynamic of poet Karoline von Gunderode's correspondence with writer Bettina von Arnim. Underscoring their relationship's literary, intellectual nature, as well as the intensity of their emotional entanglement, Susan spoke with quiet but unassailable authority about his and Mabel Loomis Todd's editing of Emily's poems. Making clear that she was thoroughly acquainted with Emily's poetic corpus, Susan approves of most of the titles used in Poems (1890) and, in a January 4, 1891 letter, corrected the printing of "afar" for "ajar" in "I know some lonely Houses / off the Road" (F 13; P 289). In subsequent editions "ajar" was printed.

We cannot help but approach this relationship with the assumption that Emily was always the writer and Sue the reader; yet Sue constantly wrote essays, reviews, journals, poems, letters, and memorials, and produced commonplace books along with scrapbooks of her own publications, of clippings about admired figures, and of favorite works by oher writers, including Emily. In April 1852 Dickinson enthused over "Susie" keeping a journal, exclaiming that she wants "to get it bound - at my expense" (H L18; L 88); and among the papers found in the Evergreens is a journal Susan kept of a trip to Europe at the age of 75. As an elderly traveller and inveterate writer, Susan took care to record her observations in a literary vein.

Besides a lifelong habit of keeping journals, Susan published several stories in the Republican in the early 1900s. A lengthy 1903 review of "Harriet Prescott's Early Work" cited Emily Dickinson as an authority to argue for its republication. In "Annals of the Evergreens," a typescript unpublished until the 1980s (abridged version in Amherst [Alumni Quarterly] Spring 1981), Susan first praised Prescott's "Pomegranate Flowers," then proceeded to describe an Evergreens life rich in cultural exchange: reading the Brownings, Thomas de Quincey, Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Carlyle, and Shakespeare, and entertaining such distinguished visitors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Olmsted. Personalities more intimately associated with the Dickinson circle also grace these pages as Susan related luscious accounts of lunches with "fresh asparagus" and "salad from our own garden" and dinners of "very nice lamb and strawberries" with editor Samuel Bowles, his wife Mary, friend Maria Whitney, Josiah and Elizabeth Holland, and Judge Otis P. Lord.

Among Susan's surviving papers are hundreds and hundreds of letters, numerous essays on subjects as diverse as nursing and architecture, and a review of the work of Arthur Sherburne Hardy, which she found most "refreshing" because "it does not presuppose idiocy in the reader but makes a little demand upon a moderate equipment of mind and imagination" (a remark equally applicable to her appreciation of Emily's poems). Besides collecting paeans to Queen Victoria, Susan wrote tributes to strong pioneering women such as Elizabeth Blackwell, the United States' first female doctor.

Susan's writings witness care and passion for the word--drafts of essays and poems show careful searching for the most effective vocabulary and syntax. That she did not regard the printed word as final is obvious from the fact that several clippings of her own work placed in a scrapbook show her revising after their appearance in the Republican. That she was confident of her intellectual abilities and critical acumen is demonstrated by her correspondence about such matters not only with Higginson and Bowles, but also with other leading editors. Moreover, "Annals" shows clearly that she was a most capable conversationalist who held her own with Emerson and was known by many for her ability to handle the most difficult, "hard reading" (Years 2:78).

Besides publishing critical pieces and stories, Susan published at least one poem, "Love's Reckoning," and wrote quite a few others. Though more conventional in form than Emily's, Susan's poems attend to many of the same subjects. "There are autumn days of the Spring" distinctly echoes both "These are the days when Birds come back" (F 6; P 130) and "The Crickets / sang / And set the / Sun" (H 325; Set 6c; P 1104), and "The Sun kept low as an oven" recalls the "Stooping as low as the / kitchen window - " of "Blazing in Gold - and / Quenching - in Purple!" (F 13; P 228) and "The sun kept stooping - stooping - low" (F 8; P 152).

Although Susan has been roundly criticized for not seeing Emily's poems into print with good speed, Susan's own account in the 1890 letter to Higginson shows that she had projected a volume with "many bits of her prose--passages from early letters. . .quaint bits to my children &c &c." In a March 1891 letter to another editor, she elaborated her vision to include Emily's "illustrations," "showing her witty humorous side, which has all been left out of" the 1890 Poems. Susan described a much more holistic volume than the epitome of the late 19th-century poetry book produced by Higginson and Todd. Her outline for the production shows that she would not have divided the poems into the conventional categories but would have emphasized poetry's integration with quotidian experience, Emily's intellectual prowess, and her philosophical interrogations of the spiritual, corporeal, emotional, and mental realms.

A profound love and deep appreciation for nature pervaded Susan's sensibilities, and she clearly favored art focused on the natural world's splendors, its "Eden, always eligible" (L 391). In the Evergreens, John F. Kensett's "Sunset with Cows" (1856) bears Susan's name on the back, and one of her manuscript poems seems a direct response to the painting. Her regard for nature is intense enough to be characterized as religious or spiritual, and Susan was indeed devoutly religious from her late teens and throughout her adulthood. Late in her life, she turned toward the rituals of High Church and even pondered becoming a Roman Catholic, but was dissuaded by Bishop F. Dan Huntington. Yet her religious devotions were far more than ceremonial, for Susan spent almost every Sabbath for six years in the 1880s establishing a Sunday school in Logtown, a poor village not far from Amherst.

Susan's tasteful enactment of ritual for profound utterance is perhaps best displayed in the simple flannel robe she designed and in which she dressed Emily for death, laying her out in a white casket, cypripedium and violets (symbolizing faithfulness) at her neck, two heliotropes (symbolizing devotion) in her hand (St. Armand 74-75). This final act over Emily's body underscores "their shared life, their deep and complex intimacy" as well as the anticipation of "postmortem resurrection" of that intimacy (Hart 255; Pollak 137). Susan also penned Emily's obituary, a loving portrayal of a strong, brilliant woman, devoted to family, neighbors, and her writing, for which she had the most serious objectives and highest ambitions. (SEE: Appendix B; Biographical Approaches; Publication; Visual Arts; Women's Culture)

RECOMMENDED: FF; Hart, Ellen Louise, "The Encoding of Homoerotic Desire: Emily Dickinson's Letters and Poems to Susan Dickinson, 1850-1886"; Mudge, Jean McClure, "Emily Dickinson and 'Sister Sue'"; Oberhaus, Dorothy, "In Defense of Sue"; St. Armand, Barton. Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul's Society; Smith, Martha Nell. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson.

For more on Susan Dickinson, see Writings by Susan Dickinson, "Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem," and Emily Dickinson's Correspondences.

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