![]() ![]() “Best Witchcraft is Geometry,” Emily Dickinson would later write. ![]() Sister and brother alike were taken with her poised erudition and her Uranian handsomeness - her flat, full lips and dark eyes were not exactly masculine, her unchiseled oval face and low forehead not exactly feminine. Poised and serious at twenty, dressed in black for the sister who had just died in childbirth and who had been her maternal figure since their parents’ death, Susan cast a double enchantment on Emily and Austin Dickinson. ![]() 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. 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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