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An Earl Unmasked by Rachel Ann Smith7/4/2023 She entered Dickinson’s life in the summer of 1850, which the poet would later remember as the season “when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens.” Susan Gilbert had settled in Amherst, to be near her sister, after graduating from the Utica Female Academy - one of a handful of academically rigorous educational institutions available to women at the time. (Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, gift of Millicent Todd Bingham, 1956) The only authenticated photograph of the poet. (This essay is drawn from my book.) Emily Dickinson at seventeen. I devote more than one hundred pages of Figuring to their beautiful, heartbreaking, unclassifiable relationship that fomented some of the greatest, most original and paradigm-shifting poetry humanity has ever produced. Throughout the poet’s life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her “Only Woman in the World.” Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest - an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior.
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