text: It's an idea that's been around for while. \n\nThere is no unambiguous evidence.  She never married, she was reclusive, and wrote passionate letters to the woman who eventually became her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert.  She wrote her letters even when she lived next door, lots of them -- three times as many as she wrote to any other person.\n\nThe language in the letters has been dismissed as typical of the 19th century, but it goes deeper.  Dickinson refers to her as an "absent Lover" whom she wanted to hold and kiss, and calls herself "Susan's Idolator [who] keeps a Shrine for Susan."  She not only expreseed desperate grief at being separated, but got "hot and feverish" (in her words) at the prospect of seeing her again.\n\nThese letters (nearly 300 of them) and the obvious role that Susan played as her muse have been added to such poems as:\n\nHer breast is fit for pearls,\nBut I was not a `Diver' -\nHer brow is fit for thrones\nBut I have not a crest.\nHer heart is fit for home -\nI - a Sparrow - build there\nSweet twigs and twine\nMy perennial nest.\n\nAnd this poem, believed to describe a sexual encounter:\n\nWild Nights--Wild Nights!\nWere I with thee\nWild Nights should be\nOur luxury!\n\nFutile--the Winds--\nTo a Heart in port--\nDone with the Compass--\nDone with the Chart!\nRowing in Eden\n\n\nAh, the Sea!\nMight I but moor--Tonight--\nIn Thee!\n\n\n...have led many scholars to admit the possibility that she had least had lesbian feelings, whether or not she ever acted on them.  Others, of course, feel that they have to "protect" her legacy and keep it free from even the suggestion that she might have been a lesbian.