Who's Afraid of Susan Dickinson?

Biographies delimit the range of what relationships and writing conditions are imaginable for a writer. In “Who’s Afraid of Susan Dickinson?,” Martha Nell Smith asks a deceptively simple question: How does one... [ view full abstract ]

Biographies delimit the range of what relationships and writing conditions are imaginable for a writer. In “Who’s Afraid of Susan Dickinson?,” Martha Nell Smith asks a deceptively simple question: How does one acknowledge but erase the erasure of a life story vital to the literary and cultural environs of one of our most celebrated writers? Two major forces, one cultural concerning fear of unprofessional women’s significance, and one personal concerning adultery’s dramas, conspired to downplay the importance of Susan Dickinson, Emily Dickinson’s most trusted literary advisor. The subsequent character assassinations on Susan “are little short of a disgrace to American biography” (John Erskine 1947). Besides sharing lifelong passions for reading and nature with Emily, Susan also situated her in a world abounding with paintings, music, literary salons, and delectable dining fare. Yet the undiscovered public knowledge about Susan Dickinson was, for over a century, scattered like pieces of a puzzle, dispersed in bits in scholarly writings and even malicious gossip. The intelligible forms and stories told by bringing together the logically related parts of those pieces arguably constitute the “omitted center” of Dickinson studies. This paper tells some of the indispensable stories made legible by reassembling the disjointed, confusing pieces of Susan Dickinson’s biography. Revealed also is a larger story about unnecessary limitations on knowledge production imposed by some widely shared (and denied) sociocultural fears as well as the opportunities afforded by queering biography.