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emilydickinsonshistory · 2 years

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Otis Phillips Lord, Edward Dickinson’s old friend and a judge on the Massachusetts supreme court, had studied law at Amherst just before Emily was born and during the first 18 months of her life. He had graduated in 1832, and Amherst had conferred on him an honorary doctor of laws in 1869. He was married to Elizabeth Farley, a high-minded descendant of John Leverett, president of Harvard. They were childless and lived near the Witch House in Salem. The Lords used to stay at the Homestead, and after Edward died, “the dear Lords,” as Emily wrote, continued to visit. The judge appears to have come on his own for a week in October 1875, when Emily, far from reclusive, spoke of his visit as being “with me.” Mrs. Lord died in December 1877, on Emily’s 47th birthday. Over the next few months, Emily turned to the handsome widower – not as a father but as a suitor of sorts. Later, a granddaughter of Dickinson’s confidante Elizabeth Holland suggested that Lord’s tenderness had “long been latent in his feeling for her.” Dickinson expert and Mount Holyoke College professor Christopher Benfey has asserted this possibility more strongly, suggesting in his book A Summer of Hummingbirds that the attraction went back to the summer of 1862, when Lord came to Amherst as commencement speaker. Eighteen years her senior, his gray hair was shading into white; his expression calm and contained – not a man to exact attention, though his grave and upright bearing subdued others, not only the guilty, as he passed judgment. Lord looked stern “as the Profile of a Tree against a winter sky,” Emily ventured to say. He appeared as rigid as Emily’s father, but she had a way with elders of this sort, breezing through their barest branches. Her amusing darts disarmed men of law who were accustomed to wither lesser beings; the drafts of her letters to Lord are witty, confident, open, and playfully physical – hardly the way modest women were meant to behave. Gossip had it that Emily’s sister-in-law, Susan, had been taken aback to break in on the supposed recluse, the image of white-frocked chastity, in the judge’s arms. Lord’s niece Abbie Farley claimed to have heard Susan deplore that embrace. Emily, the niece is reported to have said, had not “any idea of morality.” She was bound to take this view, for Miss Farley, aged 35, was the judge’s heir. She and her mother, Mrs. Lord’s sister, were due to inherit jointly $23,000. Together with another niece on the Farley side (due to inherit $10,000), they kept house for the judge. If he remarried, he would have new claims. “Little hussy,” Abbie fumed over a copy of Emily’s Poems decades later when questioned about the celebrated poet Abbie had once known. “Loose morals,” Abbie remembered. “She was crazy about men. Even tried to get Judge Lord. Insane too.” To Emily herself, Lord’s love was “Improbable.” It would have been unthinkable in her father’s lifetime: his carefully protected daughter permitting such license, and with his old friend. The voice of judgment, “I say unto you” thundering through the startled air at morning prayers, had cleansed impurities from the minds of Edward Dickinson’s listeners. As Emily put it humorously, “Fumigation ceased when Father died.” Now, four years on, that voice no longer ruled. In her late 40s and early 50s, she found herself free to partake of the forbidden tree. With Lord, Emily was unafraid to speak up, inviting a glint of humor she called “the Judge Lord brand.” A smile broke when she teased him with the solemnities of courtroom language. “Crime,” “confess,” “punish,” “penalty,” “incarcerate” were the words she applied to his supposed trial of her as a wanting lover. “I confess that I love him,” she has to admit, but cannot pay the “debt” she owes him. Can her “involuntary Bankruptcy” be a crime? Will he “punish” her? “Incarcerate me in yourself – that will punish me,” she makes bold to suggest. Flashing repartee of this sort exploded into intimacy within months of Mrs. Lord’s death. That year, 1878, there’s immediate talk of consummation. She wasn’t shy when she drafted her letters to Lord: “lift me back, wont you, for only there [in your arms] I ask to be. . . .” He was her “lovely Salem”; she, his “Amherst.” Weekly letters, directed to arrive on Mondays by the judge’s habits of punctuality, bonded Salem and Amherst. Emily’s “little devices to live till Monday” – attempts to concentrate on work – gave way to “the thought of you.” So she said to herself, if not to Salem, in a penciled scrap that breaks into verse celebrating the nature of love (fleet, indiscreet, wrong, and joyful). As a single man, it was no longer proper for Lord to stay at the Homestead on his now more frequent trips to Amherst; he and Emily met in the parlor. There, they held each other while the air about them fanned the question of marriage. In August and September of 1880, he practically lived in Amherst. During this time, they may have entered into some kind of private engagement. Softly, her thin hand is offered to him in response to what she calls “your distant hope.” He leaves saying it had been a “heavenly hour.” How sweet was his candor, she wrote. His racy talk, familiar to colleagues on the bench, called out an unfamiliar side to Emily. “I will not wash my arm,” she said, “twill take your touch away,” and again: “It is strange that I miss you at night so much when I was never with you – but the punctual love invokes you soon as my eyes are shut – and I wake warm with the want sleep had almost filled. . .” The question of marriage came up more seriously in November and December 1882, after Emily’s mother, also named Emily, had died. Eyeing the poet’s thinness, Lord teased her as “Emily Jumbo” (the famous elephant, Jumbo, in Barnum’s circus had recently appeared near Amherst). She tossed the joke back. “Sweetest name, but I know a sweeter – Emily Jumbo Lord. Have I your approval?” He assumed that she was now freed to live with him. He replied, “I will try not to make it unpleasant.” She was touched that he could invite her into his “dear Home” with “loved timidity.” Her answer, as often when she was moved, almost falls into verse. “So delicate a diffidence, how beautiful to see! I do not think a Girl extant has so divine a modesty. You even call me to your Breast with apology! Of what must my poor Heart be made?”

Lyndall Gordan, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, excerpted from a reprint in The Boston Globe

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sapphiccharacterstournament · 1 month

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Canon Sapphic Characters Tournament Round Four/Semifinals (Bracket 8)

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enbylestat · 2 months

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Vampride 2024

A violinist becomes hostage of a Lelio and Flaminia.

"Hope" is a thing with feathers.

Where did you get those eyes, mon cher?

Always on the margins.

To define is to limit.

Allons-y Chér(ie).

Full collection here.

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henrythepug · 2 months

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Emily Dickinson wasn’t a recluse she just didn’t want to go to your stupid fucking party.

#she really wasn’t a recluse though #she just didn’t go to church and didn’t go out much #she was stepping away from society because it was telling her what to do #but it’s a fact that you could visit her at her house whenever you wanted #this idea of her locking herself in her room to write poetry for some mysterious man is so fabricated by the very society she was avoiding #emily dickinson #poetry #gay #lesbian #bisexual

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adoralopez · 1 year

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taylor swift 3rd reincarnation of sappho

#taylor swift #gaylor #gay #sapphic #sappho #lesbian #bisexual #wlw #swiftgron #the 2nd was emily dickinson #emily dickinson #dickinson

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mosquitoes-are-stupid · 3 months

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Under my skin

I need you, in a way I’ll never be able to understand

I crave you, in a way that I’ll never be able to satisfy

I love you, in a way that I’ll never be able to express

I miss you, in a way that I’ll never be able to satiate

I want you, in a way that I’ll never be able to receive

I see you, in a way that I’ll never be able to tell you

You are a part of me, perhaps as much as the blood in my very veins

Yet you are so far away, and distant as the days of my childhood

Nourishing me as a core memory but chilling me as nostalgia does, a jaded mind

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jomarchswritingjacket · 5 months

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we all deserve a cute little cottage that has a lush garden and is filled with cats and books and teacups and we also deserve a lovely wife to share them with

(by we i mean the sapphics)

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just-rogi · 11 months

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Taylor Swift is a reverse Misha Collins in the sense that every 6-12 months the public decides that she’s bisexual and gets shocked and angry when she comes out as straight

#to be fair #do I think miss swift has done some gayass shit? yeah I do #but y’all need to be fucking fr #even if you believe she’s secretly a closet case you’ve gotta be serious #this is Taylor fuckjng swift she isn’t going to come out tomorrow as a champion for bisexuals #at MOST she’s gonna make out with some white female celebrity while drunk #and then write a song from the perspective of Emily Dickinson #and then continue to be Taylor Swift (heterosexual)#stop misha collinsing this poor woman #Taylor swift #gaylor #misha collins

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wampyrz · 4 months

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call me emily the way i put my dickinson pussy

#english literature #literature #lit #english #poetry #transcendentalism #emily dickinson #homosexuality #lgbt #sapphic #lesbian #bisexual #transgender #gay #caelan posting

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rhfffas · 2 years

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I present you, cake-eating lesbians

“cake” is a secret wlw love language your honor-

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arielmagicesi · 1 year

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still irritated with this Dickinson biographer despite the fact that I really appreciate the depth of research and the levels of historical and social context that this book gives to the poems and her life... but Jesus Christ, we get it, you’re the most specialest smartest Dickinson scholar birthday boy, every other Dickinson scholar is stupid, especially those flighty airhead women who believe that she might MAYBE have been attracted to other women. I cannot read another snide remark about how “those who believed the line ‘a Woman dear I wished to Kiss, her name was Sue, don’t misinterpret this’ refers to her supposed lesbianism are clearly misled, and stupid, and I hate them” right after insisting “the poem ‘I’m on a boat leaving another boat’ is OBVIOUSLY about a MAN she was in LOVE with, and it HAD to be a man and I’m gonna devote two pages to talking about how anyone who thinks it wasn’t a real live man is stupid” just oh my god, can you PLEASE stick to the research and the facts and the poems and the historical context stuff... I don’t care anymore if Emily was the most heterosexual woman of history, can you please talk about anything else ffs

#btw i do think that 'master' from the 'master' letters was a man and she had a terrible crush on that man #i just think she also had crushes on women. bisexuals really do exist!#also don't try to look up the quotes i wrote. they are jokes. emily did not write 'i'm on a boat leaving another boat' lol #well maybe she did. a lot of the things she wrote are lost to history. who knows #next time i read dickinson scholarship i'm gonna find something written by a woman. ideally a queer woman #written by me

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sapphiccharacterstournament · 2 months

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Canon Sapphic Characters Tournament Round Three (Bracket 8)

#nico minoru #runaways #marvel runaways #marvel's runaways #lyrica okano #emily dickinson #hailee steinfeld #dickinson #dickinson apple tv #canon sapphic characters tournament #tumblr tournament #fandom polls #tumblr poll #wlw #lesbian #bisexual #emisu #deanoru

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midnightbloopers · 2 years

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Somewhere I knew

We were not meant to be.

But does love ever listen?

It just happens, makes you believe in the unfathomable, lets you desire the things you consider sin and even pushes you to commit those sins.

It makes you a sinner. But the irony here is that you like being a sinner and you would give anything to have it all once more; even when it has broken you into pieces.

And since now you are a sinner ; love becomes your detainer to keep you in its shackles forever.

[Dickinson : Emily & Sue ; worth watching. Available on apple TV. ]