The Questionably Queer History of Emily Dickinson

Many of us read Emily Dickinson's poems in school, and if you were an English major like me, I bet you can recite at least a little bit of "Because I could not stop for death..." (he kindly stopped just for me, the carriage held but just ourselves and immortality! Okay, I'll stop now). 

That education showed us that Dickinson was a foundational American poet and early feminist writer, but most likely never even suggested she may have been queer. The 2019-2021 Apple TV show, "Dickinson," portrayed Emily as queer, which was likely the first time many readers had thought of her as in the LGBTQ+ community. 

So, was that fact or fiction? The answer is about as straightforward as the opening line in her poem, "Tell the truth but tell it slant." We can't slap a modern sexuality label on a woman who lived in the 1800s, but Dickinson's work has given queer readers plenty to recognize, question, and celebrate.

Expanding on the Dickinson We Were Taught

For decades, popular culture presented Dickinson as a lonely, reclusive spinster who dressed in white, rarely left her bedroom, and quietly wrote poems that no one appreciated until after her death. There is some truth within that familiar image. Dickinson never married, increasingly limited her social interactions, and published only a small number of poems during her lifetime. But like many artists, that summary is not even close to the full story. 

Dickinson exercised much control over her artistic identity. Literary scholar Páraic Finnerty argues that Dickinson’s modern reputation is rooted partly in her willingness to reject the rules governing women, writers, and public life. She became, paradoxically, an enormously famous poet partly because she refused the traditional path toward fame. Her “private habits of noncompliance,” Finnerty writes, have since been transformed into “public, inspirational acts of defiance.”

Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson

At the center of queer scholarship about Dickinson is her relationship with Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, her childhood friend, closest literary reader, neighbor, and eventual sister-in-law.

Emily and Susan corresponded for more than three decades. Dickinson sent Susan hundreds of letters, notes, and poems, often using language that was passionate, intimate, and deeply admiring. This was not one-sided admiration either. Scholars increasingly recognize Susan as one of Dickinson’s most important intellectual companions and perhaps the most significant audience for her poetry.

In one letter, Dickinson wrote:

“To be Susan is Imagination,
To have been Susan, a Dream—”

Elsewhere, Dickinson described Susan through images of queens, riches, distant countries, and unattainable treasures. Benjamin Meiners argues that Dickinson frequently used imagined Latin American landscapes to articulate her queer desires for Susan. These images allowed her to envision “a space of erotic belonging” that could not easily exist within the social and domestic limitations of nineteenth-century Amherst.

So, did Dickinson and Susan take their relationship past the "talking" phase? Did they make scissoring jokes together? We can't really know for sure. Some scholars understand their correspondence as an example of the intense romantic friendships that could exist between nineteenth-century women. Others argue that the depth, continuity, and erotic quality of Dickinson’s devotion to Susan justify describing the relationship as lesbian or queer.

The one thing we know to be true is that lesbians existed in the nineteenth century, even if they were not able to be loud and proud. Just because women lived in a society where a same sex relationship was not allowed doesn't mean they didn't have feelings and attraction. 

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Mixed Messages in the Text

Dickinson maintained important relationships with men, including Benjamin Newton, Samuel Bowles, and Judge Otis Phillips Lord. Her surviving correspondence with Lord, written late in her life, contains affectionate and potentially romantic language. Some passages suggest they may even have considered marriage.

There are also Dickinson’s mysterious “Master Letters," three passionate draft letters addressed to an unidentified recipient. Proposed candidates for “Master” have included Bowles, Minister Charles Wadsworth, George Gould, Susan Dickinson, and others. Some scholars believe the letters may have been literary exercises rather than messages intended for a specific person.

Dickinson’s love poetry is frankly, hard to classify. The genders of speakers and beloveds are frequently unstated or ambiguous. Rather than proving one definitive interpretation, that ambiguity allows her poems to exist outside the expected structure of heterosexual romance.

She may have loved men, or women, or both. Or no one at all! Acknowledging her attachment to Susan does not require erasing the other emotionally significant relationships in her life.

So... Is She Really a Queer Icon?

Historians have not conclusively proved Dickinson was a lesbian, and they likely never will. That's not what's important. We love Emily and fold her into queer historical icons because her life and writing repeatedly pushed against fixed assumptions about women and love.

She rejected the traditional expectations placed on women to marry, become publicly agreeable, and subordinate their intellectual ambitions. Her writing challenged conventional poetic rules. Her poems resisted clear divisions between masculine and feminine speakers, friendship and romance, privacy and public expression, or religious devotion and erotic longing.

Modern portrayals such as "Wild Nights with Emily" and Apple TV+’s "Dickinson" have helped bring these interpretations to a broader audience. Both place Emily and Susan’s relationship near the center of Dickinson’s story, countering the cultural image of a loveless woman writing alone in her bedroom. Finnerty argues that these portrayals foreground Dickinson’s “increasingly prominent role as an LGBTQ+ icon” while using her defiant life to affirm non-heteronormative identities and experiences.

Of course, these portrayals are interpretations of her life, not biographies. But the old image of Dickinson as a miserable spinster was also an interpretation. History is often shaped as much by what editors, biographers, and cultural gatekeepers choose to exclude as by what they preserve.

The most honest approach is not to replace one rigid version of Dickinson with another. She's still holding secrets that make her complicated. She's intensely private but emotionally expressive, and romantically ambiguous while also deeply passionate. 

We can't fully figure her out. And I think she'd be very pleased about that. 

 

 

Works Cited

Dickinson, Emily. “Emily Dickinson’s Love Life.” Emily Dickinson Museum. 

Finnerty, Páraic. “‘You’ll Be the Only Dickinson They Talk About in Two Hundred Years’: Queer Celebrity, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, A Quiet Passion, Wild Nights with Emily, and Apple TV+’s Dickinson.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1–30.

Hart, Ellen Louise, and Martha Nell Smith, editors. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Paris Press, 1998.

Heimann, Lina. “The Queer Archives of Emily Dickinson.” Global Modernities, 9 June 2022.

Meiners, Benjamin. “Lavender Latin Americanism: Queer Sovereignties in Emily Dickinson’s Southern Eden.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 27, no. 1, 2018, pp. 24–44.