Melville - whose debut novel had rendered him a literary star in his twenties - had just turned thirty-one. The achingly shy, brooding writer, once celebrated as “handsomer than Lord Byron,” had risen to celebrity a decade earlier, much thanks to a glowing endorsement by Margaret Fuller. On August 5, 1850, Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne at a literary gathering in the Berkshires.
That other love unfolds alongside Dickinson’s in Figuring - a book I wrote to explore, among other existential perplexities, the bittersweet beauty of asymmetrical and half-requited loves. The summer when nineteen-year-old Emily Dickinson met the love of her life - the orphaned mathematician-in-training Susan Gilbert, who would come to be the poet’s greatest muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her “Only Woman in the World” - another intense, label-defying love was igniting in the heart of another literary titan-to-be some fifty miles westward.
