Emily Dickinson's Correspondences
Correspondence with Susan Dickinson

H B44

JL 258, JP 299

FP 418

OMC 70

early 1860s

ink

gilt-edged

watermark/embossment: Q, Queen profile, embossed

18 x 11 cm.


FF 228, with poem omitted. After using tenuous evidence to link this letter-poem to a male correspondent, Benjamin Franklin Newton, Johnson suggests that Dickinson may have been writing about "Sue herself" (see Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography 38-41). Johnson's stretch is yet another example of editorial commentary that reflects some bias against Sue and thus elides her lifelong importance as a kind of muse for Emily.

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Image reproduced by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Not to be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.
Transcription and commentary copyright 1996 by Martha Nell Smith, all rights reserved
Last updated on April 18, 2001
Maintained by Tanya Clement <tclement@umd.edu>