On Thursday Sept. 29, Martha Nell Smith delivered the eighth annual Walter Harding Lecture in the College Union Ballroom. Smith is the founding director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the humanities and a noted Emily Dickinson scholar.
She began her talk by announcing that she would be sharing information she’d never made public before.
As a graduate student researching Dickinson, Smith came across a collection of documents long-supposed to be a correspondence between the poet and a love interest, Judge Otis P. Lord, and something about the papers struck her as odd.
Excited by her discovery, she sought advice from her dissertation director, who advised her to keep the information to herself until she was older and had established a reputation in her field.
“It took me 25 years, but I’ve come back to it and I’m ready to talk about it,” Smith said.
The Dickinson scholar shared with the audience images of the documents she first saw as a graduate student, sometimes collectively referred to as the “Lord letters.” The documents consist mostly of scraps of paper and drafts of poems, and as Smith pointed out, it isn’t certain they were ever mailed. Still, in her 1954 book on Dickinson, Millicent Todd Bingham declared these documents obvious love letters to Lord.
As an explanation for such contrivances, Smith said that in the period following World War I, America experienced what she called a “lavender scare,” rather than the Red Scare. She referenced records released in 2000 showing that people were driven out of government service more often for being suspected homosexuals than for being suspected communists.
Disregarding the so-called Lord letters, Smith placed more importance on Dickinson’s correspondence with her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson. Smith said that Dickinson sent two to three times as many poems to Susan as she did to anyone else and in her letters and the poet seemed to hold Susan’s opinion of her work in high regard.
Smith suggested that Dickinson had a strong romantic desire for her sister-in-law and experienced a great amount of guilt associated with these feelings. In her letters, Emily apologizes after writing that she wants to kiss and hold Susan and expresses fear that God will punish her for writing about such things.
Smith explained that Dickinson’s sexuality and the gender of the love object in her poems are still debated today, but to her, one thing is clear: The poet was constantly writing letters to friends and family and seeking feedback – especially Susan’s – on her poetry, and common conceptions of Dickinson as a reclusive loner are exaggerated and false.
The Walter Harding Lecture is held yearly in honor of Walter Harding, an influential Henry David Thoreau scholar who taught in Geneseo’s English department from 1956 to 1982.
“I’ve been to all but one of the lectures and I liked this one quite a lot,” said Courtney Rawleigh, Harding’s granddaughter. “From what I’ve learned about my grandfather and what I know about him, it was along the lines of what he would have liked.”