Folger Tribute Explores Emily Dickinson’s Queer Love Letters
Martha Nell Smith reflects on Emily Dickinson’s intimate letters, her secret queer romance, and the poet's enduring legacy.
When Martha Nell Smith was a child, she was given a book called The Golden Treasury of Poetry. “I was a nerdy kid, I liked to read,” the 72-year-old academic says, adding, “I also liked to play. I was a very sporty kid too. I was a tomboy.”
The book contained several poems by Emily Dickinson. “I thought these look so simple, but when you think about it, they are really weird,” she says. “But you could say that about almost any Dickinson poem.”
Smith recounts the long and winding path that led her to become one of the foremost experts on Emily Dickinson, with a particular focus on the poet’s secretly romance-laden letters to her sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson.
“The experience of figuring out Dickinson’s love for her sister-in-law, Susan, was an adventure,” says Smith, flashing a captivating smile. “I always knew, in what I call the still small voice inside myself — my gut — that they were the love of one another’s lives, or loves. And that people had tried to hide it.”
Smith chronicles that journey in her 1998 book Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson. On Tuesday, December 9, she will join fellow scholar Aia Yousef and contemporary romance author Nikki Payne to discuss Dickinson’s life, work, and legacy at the Folger Shakespeare Library’s annual Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute.
Smith, who teaches at the University of Maryland and is a member of the LGBTQ community, wonders whether her early dive into Dickinson’s secret love life stirred her own inclinations.
“It may have,” she says. “It may have. In a former life, I was married to a male person. Now, I was a very young person when this happened, and so was he. We’re still good friends, but I realized my senior year of college, ‘Oh, I really like kissing girls. It’s different for me.’ But it was hard to realize that. As soon as I’d realized that, I’d go, ‘No, you can’t think that.’ For one thing, I was still married. But he had his own attractions to men. I don’t think they’re cause and effect. I think they’re more recognition.”
Poetry is often seen as a higher literary art form, one many people shy away from, considering it impenetrable.
“I think people are trained to say that from a very young age,” says Smith. “I really do. I think they’re taught.” But she notes that poetry is already part of our daily lives. “We call them lyrics. Some of my colleagues who shall not be named get furious with me for talking about lyrics as poems, but they are. I think Bruce Springsteen writes poems, Lucinda Williams writes poems. Nancy Griffith certainly did. Lyrics are poems. They’re definitely poems.”
I ask whether Dickinson would approve of academics mining her personal letters to uncover her proclivities, and Smith just laughs. “I think she would ask why we care, and why we would seek her approval? But I think that she would love the curiosity. She was, after all, a very curious person herself.”
The Folger’s annual Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute, which will also honor Jane Austen on her 250th birthday, takes place Tuesday, Dec. 9, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. The event is sold out, but virtual access remains available on a pay-what-you-will basis with a $10 minimum. Visit folger.edu.
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