Emily Dickinson: America's Quietest Queer Poet (feat. Martha Nell Smith)

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When you hear the name Emily Dickinson, what comes to mind? A pale little recluse in a white dress? Genius by way of virginity? A woman so pure she barely had a body at all?!

Well, grab that image by its lace collar and toss it out with last night's chamber pot contents. The real Emily Dickinson ate, farted, drank, danced, and — most inconveniently for the historians who spent a century protecting her reputation — was almost definitely queer. Emily Dickinson loved a woman, and she was not the least bit quiet about it on paper.

Conveniently for Emily, the love of her life lived right next door. Susan Gilbert Dickinson — Emily's sister-in-law, best friend, and the recipient of more of Emily's poems and letters than anyone else on earth — was the great, consuming passion of Emily's life. And she was horny about it. Extremely, gorgeously horny. The girl did not come to play.

So why don't we hear much about Susan in American lit class? For over a century, family, scholars, and a whole publishing industry worked very hard to sand Emily down into a safe, sexless genius — one who definitely wasn't writing filthy love letters to her brother's wife.

Enter our lovely guest, Martha Nell Smith — professor of English at the University of Maryland, editor and coordinator of the Dickinson Electronic Archives, and the scholar who spent her career proving everyone wrong. Her groundbreaking research on Emily and Susan's relationship rewrote what we know about Dickinson entirely.

Join Bash and Martha for as they resurrect a love story literary history tried to bury and prove once and for all that Emily Dickinson's poetry — like Emily herself — was never quiet at all.

Grab a copy of Martha Nell's Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, and go enjoy some wild nights.

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Episode Credits

Written and hosted by Bash

Produced by Dani Henion

Edited by Alex Toskas

Guest: Martha Nell Smith

© Sebastian Hendra 2026

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