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Biography 23.3 (2000) 524-533



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Beyond the Master Letters: A Computerized Word Content Analysis of Emily Dickinson Correspondence with Samuel Bowles and Susan Gilbert

John F. McDermott

Much of the personal life of one of America's greatest poets, Emily Dickinson, remains shrouded in mystery. She was relatively unknown during her lifetime, spending most of her adult years voluntarily confined to her father's house in Amherst, Massachusetts. Following her death, almost 1,800 poems, as well as drafts of correspondence she had maintained with friends and relatives, were discovered in her room. They are the principal source materials for her biographers.

Among these letters were three drafts addressed between 1858 and 1863 to an unknown recipient, with the salutation "Dear Master." Dickinson biographers have generally agreed that these so-called Master Letters were part of a larger correspondence describing different stages of an intense emotional experience: the story of a deeply frustrating love relationship, full of passion and anguish over separation and lack of response from the other person. 1 The importance of these letters, scholars agree, lies in their unique emotional style, signaling the beginning of Dickinson's most creative period as a poet, perhaps even first igniting her poetic imagination and enormous creative powers. Indeed, biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff notes that when Dickinson tries to give form to her feelings in the three Master Letters, the language of poetry floods into the prose and overtakes ordinary epistolary style (406-412).

Because of this connection with the emergence of her creativity, the identity of Master has been a matter of much speculation and sharp disagreement among Dickinson scholars. Several important figures in her life [End Page 524] have been considered candidates, but two that stand out during the same time frame are Samuel Bowles and Susan Gilbert--both long-time intimates of Dickinson, both very different from each other. Let us consider each of these candidates in turn, examining Dickinson's known correspondence with them, and comparing it with the Master Letter drafts themselves. 2

Samuel Bowles was the owner-editor of the Springfield Republican, a daily newspaper published in Massachusetts that became one of the most important in New England. Described as a charming and magnetic personality, he was an abolitionist and reformer, actively advocating woman's suffrage. As a trustee of Amherst College, he was a frequent visitor to Dickinson, and he received numerous letters and poems from her. His nicknames for Emily were "Queen" and "Daisy," both terms found in the Master correspondence. There is no question Bowles occupied a special place in Dickinson's heart. Her biographer Richard Sewall states that she "was deeply in love with him for several years and never ceased loving him at a distance for the rest of her life" (520-31). Sewall claims that her letters to Bowles contains love poems from an "imagined wife," and another Dickinson biographer, Judith Farr, also claims that Bowles was Dickinson's secret love (28).

Noting striking similarities between the Master Letters and letters Dickinson sent to her friend Susan Gilbert, feminist scholars such as Lillian Faderman and Adelaide Morris have more recently challenged the notion that Dickinson's "lover" was male. Martha Nell Smith has gone further, claiming that the earlier generally agreed upon love letters to Susan Gilbert were actually prototypes of the Master Letters. Smith argues that the Master Letters in fact articulate anxieties over separation from and rejection by a same-sex lover (174, 130-53).

Emily and Susan became close friends in the late 1840s, when Susan came to Amherst to live with her aunt. The intense relationship made Susan Emily Dickinson's favorite correspondent, and Susan received more letters and poems than anyone else over the next four decades. A school teacher by profession, Gilbert was well read, intellectual, personally stimulating, and socially ambitious. Affectionately called "Dollie" by the poet, she became engaged to Emily's brother Austin, and married him in 1856. Austin and Susan Gilbert Dickinson moved into the house next door, and while...

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