The Alchemy of Heartbreak and How to Live with Unrequited Love: The Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers”

This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring.

In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.

Not a “fright,” not a “shock,” but a terror. What lay behind this enormity implied by a woman who measured her words so meticulously? Generations of biographers have fille...