Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (review)

Open Me Carefully presents selections from Emily Dickinson’s correspondence to her sister-in-law and beloved friend, Susan Huntington Dickinson. The text offers nearly 250 of the poet’s letters, poems and hybrid texts — what Susan termed “letter poems” — and a small handful of extant notes from Susan to Emily. Spanning thirty-six years (1850–1886), the correspondence contains some twenty poems and one letter newly associated with Susan. The volume, arranged chronologically, also includes brief introductions by the editors to each of the four chapters and concludes with extensive textual notes.

The book is testimony to the literary importance of Dickinson’s letters and to the poet’s fluid treatment of genre. By weaving the poems, the letters, and the letter poems together into one work, the book vividly demonstrates that the entire corpus of Dickinson’s writing needs to be taken seriously. Selection number 102 (J288) is a stunning example of the literary brilliance of what has previously been designated (and devalued) as a letter (“Sweet Sue, / There is / no first, or last, / in Forever - ). Furthermore, the editors make a convincing case that Dickinson did not always assign rigid genre distinctions in her work — distinctions upon which most previous editions of her work have insisted. Meticulously including even the briefest personal words to Susan that often frame the letter poems, the editors convey that Dickinson’s verse was inextricably linked, both in form and content, to the seemingly ordinary, everyday currents of life.

For many readers, the book will present for the first time information about erasures and excisions of some of Dickinson’s missives to Susan: in particular, the deletion of Susan’s name as the recipient of manuscripts. The fact that these mutilations to the manuscripts exist is certainly striking and raises many questions. Hart and Smith speculate that Mabel Loomis Todd executed many of the excisions in order to reduce Susan’s importance and obscure a passionate relationship between the poet and Susan. Such speculation is an idea worth raising, but it needs evidence in order to be seriously considered.

The editors’ theories about Susan as the object of Dickinson’s desire and as the poet’s primary literary critic and collaborator are among the book’s central points. Too often Hart and Smith simply assert — without offering an argument — that the poet’s letters to Susan are infused with eroticism: an ardor that exceeds the intimate exchanges between women during the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s ground-breaking essay on the female world of love and ritual is never confronted or even referenced, leaving the reader to ponder a rather one-sided, and therefore, inherently weakened point of view.

An example of these unsupported assertions is the commentary on Dickinson’s poem, “Her breast is fit for pearls.” Hart and Smith note that “Sue” was erased from the verso and that Mabel Loomis Todd included the poem in the Samuel Bowles correspondence of her 1894 edition of the Letters. The editors contend that through her manipulations, Loomis Todd disguised a love poem to Susan. The assertion raises fundamental questions: Is it a love poem? Is the poem about Susan? Is it possible that the poem was sent to Susan, but was not about Susan? What is the evidence that Loomis Todd “falsely” and, by inference, intentionally obscured Susan as the poem’s recipient? These questions go unaddressed.

The theory advanced concerning Susan as Dickinson’s primary reader, critic, and collaborator also is not as well argued as one would hope. Certainly, the famous exchange between the poet and Susan on “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” demonstrates that on this occasion the poet did solicit her sister-in-law’s advice. (Although it should be noted that Dickinson did not take Susan’s advice either in the versions of the poem she copied into her fascicles, or in the one she later sent to Thomas Wentworth...