Susan Huntington Dickinson was born on December 19, 1830—nine days after Emily. Susan and Emily grew up together and remained lifelong friends, with Susan marrying Austin and having three children with him. Scholars and readers debate their friendship and whether it was platonic or sexual. Though they regularly saw each other in person, Susan and Emily exchanged countless letters and poems, and the correspondence implies an erotic attachment.

Ellen Louis Hart and Martha Nell Smith, the editors of Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Wesleyan, 2019), describe Susan as “the beloved friend who was [Emily’s] central source of inspiration, love, and intellectual and poetic discourse” (xi). Susan destroyed the letters and poems that were, in her words, “too personal and adulatory to ever be printed” (xii), yet the surviving poems and letters support Hart’s and Smith’s claim of an intense relationship.

In a poem Emily sent Susan, Emily calls herself, “Susan’s Idolater keeps / A Shrine for Susan” (156). In “Wild nights — Wild nights!,” the speaker arguably idolizes the addressee, turning them into a paradisiacal sea. The fervent tone of the poem matches the passion of the letters and poems Emily sent Susan, suggesting Susan is the addressee and Emily is the speaker.