The Books Briefing: The Power of Friendship

Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to a stranger in 1870 in which she asked the recipient, the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to read a few of her poems. The letter sparked an enduring correspondence between the two, who became friends before eventually meeting eight years later. The friendship was said to have changed Dickinson, giving her a new confidence, as Martha Ackmann chronicles in her book These Fevered Days. The authors (and friends) Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, in A Secret Sisterhood, also document literary friendships, focusing on the influential relationships that some famous women writers had with one another.

Platonic relationships, as a subject of and catalyst for writing, present the richness and profundity of the connections we have with nonfamilial, nonromantic companions. Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life follows the friendship of four queer men who support one another while dealing with trauma rooted in their coming of age.

Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child, the last of the Neapolitan novels, revisits a pivotal moment in the main characters’ friendship, answering old mysteries while also tracking a new story line about one of the women’s disappearance decades later. Marlena, by Julie Buntin, focuses on the friendship of two teenage girls—one of whom (a troubled soul and adventurer) dies tragically, leaving the other to grapple with the terms of their relationship.

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Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas.

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The encounter that revealed a different side of Emily Dickinson

“Dickinson’s letter [to Thomas Wentworth Higginson] set into motion a correspondence with Higginson that lasted almost a quarter of a century. Eight years after writing her initial letter, on August 16, 1870, Dickinson and Higginson finally met face-to-face.”