A question

Can love survive without possession?

The archive is not trying to make the answer yes. It is trying to watch what people did when they could not keep the person they wanted.

• A Hedge Away

  Emily Dickinson and Susan Huntington Gilbert lived a hedge apart. The letters and poems are intimate, queer-readable, and tangled in family. A modern book-title is not the name she gave her life.

• Unsterbliche Geliebte

  In July 1812 Beethoven writes, in pencil, to a woman he calls immortal. The letter stays with him. Her name does not.

• To Her Vicereine, and to Learning

  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote love sonnets, some toward the Countess of Paredes, and the letter Respuesta a Sor Filotea. Friendship, desire, convent, colonial gender. Not a sticker. Not a denial.

• Kiss Me Again

  Œuvres de Louïze Labé Lionnoize: sonnets, including “Baise m’encor.” The mouth on the page is certain. Whether one woman of Lyon wrote it is a living scholarly question. The poems survive either way.