Volume 21, Number 21 & 22 · January 23, 1975
Dickinsons in Love
By Irvin Ehrenpreis
The Life of Emily Dickinson
by Richard B. Sewall
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2 vols., 821 pp., $30.00
Looking at the Dickinsons in love, one gets some useful insights into the meaning and power of a difficult poet. Emily Dickinson was a reticent woman with a habit of passionate attachment to married men. She called the Reverend Charles Wadsworth her 'closest earthly friend' although she could have met him only two or three times, and may never have heard him preach. For the last of her recorded fixations, she settled upon an old justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. 'The air is soft as Italy, but when it touches me, I spurn it with a sigh, because it is not you,' she wrote to him when he was a recent widower of seventy and she was fifty-two. A few years earlier, she had told him, 'I am but a restive sleeper and often should journey from your arms through the happy night, but you will lift me back, won't you, for only there I ask to be.'
Review, 2575 words
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