Emily Dickinson wrote poems to a secret female lover

In the autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson confessed to a 'terror' she could tell to no one, a grief so profound she claimed she sang only to keep from being afraid. While biographers once attributed this period of mourning to a death or a hidden illness, research into Dickinson's private correspondence suggests the source was a shattered romance with a young widow named Kate Scott Anthon. Introduced by a mutual friend in 1859, the two women became inseparable, spending weeks reading literature and playing music together in the poet's Amherst home.