Amherst, two houses · Amherst, mid-nineteenth century
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.
Emily DickinsonSusan Huntington Gilbert DickinsonAustin Dickinson
Amherst
Sue was not a visitor. She was the other house. Susan Huntington Gilbert married Austin Dickinson in 1856 and lived at The Evergreens, a hedge away from the Homestead where Emily remained. Before the marriage, and after it, Emily wrote to her with a heat the family's later editors found inconvenient.
The correspondence is intimate and queer-readable without needing a courtroom of identity. She sends poems across the hedge. She asks for Sue's mind on a line. She writes as if the face in the next house were a climate. Family complexity is not a subplot: Sue is Austin's wife, Emily's chosen nearness, and later the person Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin's lover, Emily's first editor, would try to write out of the record. The 1894 Letters of Emily Dickinson are public domain and also a lesson in omission.
A modern edition of the letters to Sue was published in 1998 under the title Open Me Carefully. That phrase is a modern book's name, taken from wording on an envelope; it is not a title Dickinson gave a volume in her lifetime, and this office will not speak as if she had. The manuscripts are enough. One poem, printed in 1914 from the family papers, says the architecture in four lines: one sister in the house, and one a hedge away.
We do not have to decide, for the archive, whether this was romance, kinship, vocation, or all three in a New England vocabulary that did not owe us a confession. We have to stop pretending Sue was a footnote.
The letter
Amherst · poem sent in the household; printed 1914
One Sister have I in our house , And one a hedge away.
Primary source · Emily Dickinson, “One Sister have I in our house” (The Single Hound, 1914)
Poems, Second Series, 1891
Wild nights, Wild nights! Were I with thee Wild nights should be Our luxury!
Primary source · Emily Dickinson; addressee not named on the published page
editorial note on the archive
Todd's 1894 Letters of Emily Dickinson printed some household correspondence and left the temperature of the Sue papers largely unsaid. What the 1894 book does not contain is also part of the history: an editor with a stake in Austin's story, and a sister-in-law who had been, for Emily, the first reader.
Interpretation · WITH LOVE, on the 1894 Letters
The line that survived
One Sister have I in our house, / And one a hedge away.
Emily Dickinson, printed 1914 from family papers
What happened next
Emily died in 1886. Sue lived until 1913. The poems were brought to press by Todd and by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then later by Sue's daughter Martha. Each generation of editors inherited a quarrel.
Readers in the last half-century have returned Sue to the center of the correspondence. That return is historical work, not a series. The hedge was always there.
Distant echoes
Source / evidence
- Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd (1894)·Public domain. Valuable and incomplete. Todd's silence about Sue is itself evidence of the family quarrel that shaped the first archive.
- Poems (1890) and Poems, Second Series (1891)·First printings; public domain. “Wild nights” appears in 1891 without an assigned beloved. We do not force a dedication the book does not give.
- The Single Hound (1914)·Martha Dickinson Bianchi's edition, including “One Sister have I in our house.” Public domain in the United States.
- On “Open Me Carefully”·Hart and Smith, 1998: a copyrighted modern gathering. The phrase is an editorial title, not Dickinson's published-in-life book. We do not quote that edition.
Letters of Emily Dickinson (ed. Mabel Loomis Todd, 1894) and poems published in the 1890s are public domain. Later gathered editions, including Open Me Carefully (1998), are copyrighted; we do not treat that modern title as Dickinson's own book, and we do not quote it.
A word opens beside this story: eros
One question remains
What do we do with a beloved who is also a brother's wife, and a first reader, and a silence in the first printed book?