Open Me Carefully

byEmily Dickinson, Ellen Louise Hart (Edited by), Martha Nell Smith (Edited by)

The Sapphic Love Letters of Emily Dickinson

A long-buried love story comes to life.
Emily Dickinson as you’ve never read her before.


Emily Dickinson is one of our greatest poets. When her work was published posthumously in the 1890s, she almost instantly became a sensation. And yet, for one hundred years, her personal life was subject to censorship and misinterpretation, with little regard for her sister-in-law, neighbour and best friend: ‘dear Sue’.

Susan Huntington Dickinson was Emily’s first reader, her greatest critic and collaborator – and, as their correspondence shows, the true love of her life. In June 1852, Emily sent a letter to Susan with the tender instruction, open me carefully

Immerse yourself in these sapphic letters spanning thirty-six years and witness a love that matures to become as steadfast as a heartbeat. Gone is Emily the lonely spinster, isolated in her room; here arrives a passionate, vibrant woman who had an intense spiritual, romantic and intellectual connection with another woman.

Edited and curated by two Dickinson scholars, Open Me Carefully includes twenty poems and a letter that had never been attributed to Susan before. It will make you laugh and it will break your heart – it is for anyone who has ever been in love.

'Iridescent, puzzling, explosive' The New York Times Book Review
Faithful reproductions of the letters’ genre-defying form... Iridescent, puzzling, explosive
The New York Times Book Review

About Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. When volumes of her poems began to be published in the 1890s, she and her work became a sensation. Over four decades Dickinson carried on an erotically-charged intimate correspondence of poems, letters, and letter-poems with her beloved sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, sending her far more of her literary works than she sent to any other, and in this trove is the only instance we have of Dickinson rewriting a poem to suit her reader.
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Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • ISBN: 9781529981544
  • Length: 304 pages
  • Price: £12.99
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