How were Maria Mitchell and Ida Russell first drawn together? What happened between them? Why did Nathaniel Hawthorne ultimately repel the divine magnet of Melville’s love? Most probably, we’ll never know. Possibly, they themselves never fully did. It is almost banal to say, yet it needs to be said: No one ever knows, nor therefore has grounds to judge, what goes on between two people, often not even the people themselves, half-opaque as we are to ourselves. One thing is certain: The quotient of intimacy cannot be contained in a label like “Uranian”—or “queer,” or whatever comes next. The
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