Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

You can truly feel the love and passion between Emily and Sue just with the way Emily writes to her. I love how this book is set up and that it KEEPS the way she originally wrote everything. It’s also wonderful that it gives us some explanations about parts of those writings, it helps to better understand everything especially since some of the language she uses is harder to get nowadays. I 100% recommend getting this especially if you’re just getting into Emily Dickinson:).

It is collections like this one that make you at once grateful for and envious of the labors scholarship. I revisit Emily Dickinson for the first time since high school—I had a teacher then who introduced me to this book and was not one to proliferate all of the usual myths. This was a newer perspective back then, too. But I could not fully appreciate it at my age; a lot of Dickinson gets better the more read and experienced you are. This time around, I can’t stop thinking about it. Certainly multiple reads will cause different things to stand out. For me this time around it was the theme of love as idolatry spanning years. There’s the matter of what didn’t survive between the customary destruction of Emily’s received correspondences and subsequent deletions and excisions, and then there’s the matter of what scholars had chosen to ignore in favor of early legend. This correction is at once monumental and comforting.

If you like poems this is such a good one I recommend to literally anyone.

It isn't clear whether or not these two women were sexually involved, but they certainly shared a wonderful friendship. The book's letters are jewels of fine prose, and the emotions they contain warrant envy and perhaps imitation.

My heart breaks and melts every time while reading Emily's letters, poems, and letter-poems to Sue. Professor Smith is a hero to have brought forth those correspondences between these two intellectual women whose torrid spirits toward each other have been muted in history.

My only disappointment with this book lies with myself for not having the frame of reference inre the Bible, the classics and the news & literature of the day, to give the writing presented here the depth and flavor so tantalizingly near. Though some things transcend meanings, of course, I felt a lack of reference too in the language private and shared only between correspondents. There is, through no fault of the editors, a very noticeable mostly silence where one woman's voice surely rang, whispered, shouted, strode in over four decades of on-going intelligent and warm, in the warmest sense, and yet often distant interaction. It left me, the book, feeling like I'd stumbled upon a treasure box of letters in a sunny attic aching for the second companion box to tell the rest of the story.

Absolutely love this book! So nice to read Emily’s unedited poems and letters to Sue. I’m a big fan of the show Dickinson on Apple TV+ so reading this was nice to see a different aspect of their relationship

Every letter is so beautiful

The quality is nice with thick pages and also the content is great - with amazing personal letters and informative essays to explain the period and origins…

Ho monitorato questo libro per mesi, aspettando che tornasse in commercio o che il prezzo non fosse esorbitante. Finalmente sono riuscita ad averlo in mio possesso ed è tutto ciò che mi aspettavo, se non di più! L'articolo in sé è perfetto, arrivato in ottime condizioni, la copertina è lucida (sono rimasta sorpresa, ero cnovinta fosse opaca) e lo spessore è più di quanto immaginassi. La cosa sicuramente più interessante ed emozionante è il contenuto di questa raccolta: un'introduzione super dettagliata sugli avvicendamenti che hanno portato alla stesura di questo libro e una ricchissima raccolta di lettere (tutte da parte di Emily e tutte fedelmemte riproposte su carta stampata) palesemente piene d'amore e desiderio nei confronti di Sue. Davvero una bellissima scoperta, lo consiglio a tutt*!

This is Emily Dickinson restored to her actual words, rather than the heavily censored version put out by her brother's mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, which mystifyingly has been re-published with no warning or disclaimer. Open Me Carefully, a quotation from one of Dickinson's notes, is a selection of letters and briefer correspondence addressed to the poet's lover, her brother's wife, Susan, with whom she also maintained a lively literary dialogue. There is both humour and tenderness in these letters; a rare delight to read.

Contains all the correspondence from Emily to Susan. A correspodence full of love and admiration. Wonderful book, highly recommended if you want to know more about the relationship between them.

Me encanto el formato y como las cartas y poemas vienen ordenadas cronológicamente y también la forma en que brindan contexto acerca de la relación de Emily y Sue. Muy recomendado. Encima el libro llego antes de lo esperado y en excelentes condiciones.