The last word on: Hope

Kicking off our new monthly series about emotions in literature, Sophie Ratcliffe finds the best literary descriptions of hopefulness

Sophie Ratcliffe

Thursday 6 July 2023

Many of us find it tricky to put our feelings into words, and few feelings are as slippery as hope. For the poet Emily Dickinson, it’s always on the brink of takeoff. Hope is, she writes, “the thing with feathers” that “perches in the soul”. For Virginia Woolf, though, hoping comes down to earth. Two years after her mother’s death, the teenager consoled herself by gardening. As she wrote to her brother:

Emily Dickinson / I Hope

The Garden, 2012
by Aron Wiesenfeld

I HOPE

by Emily Dickinson

"I hope you have been well. I hope your rambles have been sweet, and your reveries spacious."

— Emily Dickinson, June 1878
From The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 1845-1886