Emily Dickinson: The Heart Has Many Doors
Susan Snively returns to the Athenæum to discuss her first novel about Emily Dickinson’s romance with Judge Otis Phillips Lord, of Salem, MA, which was inspired by her research of the surviving letters between the Dickinson and Lord. The romance was not publicly known until 1954, when Millicent Todd Bingham published Emily Dickinson, A Revelation. Although many letters had been censored—by whom, we don’t know—they disclose the candor, boldness, and eroticism of a mutual love between a middle-aged private woman in her late forties, and a public man 18 years her senior and who had known her since childhood.