The Letters of Emily Dickinson THREE VOLUMES

Book Description

This valuable resource for Dickinson scholars is based on the Thomas H. Johnson three-volume edition of the letters (published in 1958 and 1965) as well as the 1998 one-volume paperback edition. The primary importance of the concordance pertains to the poetic quality of the letters themselves. As editor of both the poems and the letters, T.H. Johnson recognizes this link when he writes: "the letters both in style and rhythm begin to take on qualities that are so nearly the quality of her poems as on occasion to leave the reader in doubt where the letter leaves off and the poem begins."

The similarities between the letters and the poems makes the typical concordance search for the poet's thematically significant words and biographical references particularly relevant. Tracing Dickinson's thoughts through her correspondence complements the ideas within her poetry and thus provides a more comprehensive insight into the poet's personal and artistic development. The concordance will facilitate an understanding of words or concepts that may be obscure in the poetry by itself. Research into Dickinson's problematic style, characterized by gaps, disjunctions, and ellipses, will be greatly enhanced.

By listing Dickinson's words together with their contexts and frequencies, the concordance provides the scholar with the ability to answer confidently questions of a statistical or stylistic nature. Finally, one of the most important functions of this concordance is to provide scholar, student, and general reader alike with endless opportunities to make exciting and unexpected discoveries by way of browsing.

Customer Reviews:

An Invaluable New Resource!.......2001-01-16

MacKenzie's concordance provides an invaluable new resource to scholars and serious readers of Emily Dickinson. The reference covers all of the over 1000 surviving letters of the poet from the Johnson 3-volume edition.

Not since the Rosenbaum concordance to the poems which appeared in 1964 has a resource been made available that will garner such prolonged interest and use from scholars. With each entry, MacKenzie provides the year (Johnson's dating when the original letter is undated), the frequency of use, the Johnson volume and letter number, page, and line number. In addition, each entry has a brief context from the original sentence in which it appears.

For a poet about whom so little is known and for whom words were so few and so well chosen, a concordance provides surprising and enlightening insights. With the increased attention paid to the letters in recent scholarship, this reference could not be produced and made available too soon for those involved in Dickinson studies.

Book Description

Only five of Emily Dickinson's poems were published while she lived; today, approximately 1,500 are in print. Dickinson's poetry reflects the power of her contemplative gifts, and her deep sensitivity courses through her correspondence as well. Lovingly compiled by a close friend, this first collection of Dickinson's letters originally appeared in 1894, only eight years after the poet's death. Although she grew reclusive in her later years and seldom saw her many friends, she thought of them often and affectionately, as her missives attest. The small cast of daily characters in Dickinson's little world takes on vivid life in the letters, and her famous wit sparkles from every page.

Customer Reviews:

The softcover edition is very nice.......2006-12-24

This edition of Letters of Emily Dickinson is a lot better than I expected after reading some reviews. It's actually really nice. The pages are of good quality. The correspondences are arranged chronologically by when they began and a few are accompanied by an image of the original, hand-written letter.

Overall, it's a solid edition.

Irresponsible Attitude in Print Quality and Paper Used.......2004-11-21

For "The Letters of Emily Dickinson" by Thomas H. Johnson, 999 pages, Hardcover.

Paper used for Hardcover Edition is terrible, thin and fragile. After few pages read, your fingers will mark the pages easily.

Printing quality is bad, may be plates used are too old. Characters are ambiguous sometimes; often an "e" looks like a "c". You can even see some fiber marks in the print, it looks like a product from an old copy machine. Unclean printing makes this too-white paper even dirtier.

This is an irresponsible attitude for Hardcover book. Unlike "The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson" also by Belknap Press Harvard, which has excellent quality. Price is about the same, $110 for 999 pages and $220 for 1442 pages.

The content suits my needs perfectly, thought it spoiled my reading everytime. It should be improved.

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Essential Piece of the Dickinson Puzzle
Precious surviving fragments of a great oeuvre.
A letter like immortality

Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters
Emily Dickinson
Manufacturer: Belknap Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0674250702

Customer Reviews:

Essential Piece of the Dickinson Puzzle.......2004-10-07

An appraisal of this great figure's work is incomplete without a good look at these selected letters. As fascinating to the Dickinson scholar as they are to the casual enthusiast, Dickinson's letters -- along with those of Keats or Hopkins -- prove that this is every bit as legitimate a genre as fiction or poetry. Some of Dickinson's most gorgeous and enduring statements are here, and to read these in chronological order is to map the gradual development of America's premier woman poet. Even in a letter she wrote at 12-years-old, the idiosyncratic dashes with which she distinguished her poetic voice are abundant, and already have that effect of forcing the reader to savor clusters of words as they unravel down the page. Similarly, Dickinson's mind-blowing instinct for the staggering metaphor is in full gear throughout ("Vinnie came soft as a moccasin") and, for all her great death poetry, it is in a letter regarding the death of her father where we find perhaps her most vulnerable and moving confrontation with mortality:

"Father does not live with us now -- he lives in a new house. Though it was built in an hour it is better than this. He hasn't any garden because he moved after gardens were made, so we take him the best flowers, and if we only knew he knew, perhaps we could stop crying."

Perhaps most fascinating of all, though, is the mixture of extremes Dickinson's personality manifests throughout these letters, a crude bluntness that mingles with the most tender innocence. She at once condemns a cousin's valentine as "A little condescending, & sarcastic, your Valentine to me, I thought" and begins another missive with the exuberant mysticism of a child speaking as if out of some fairytale: "I wanted to write, and just tell you that me, and my spirit were fighting this morning. It isn't known generally, and you musn't tell anybody." Of course, this book also includes that characteristically bizarre and unforgettable final letter, which she wrote while suffering from the illness that would take her life just days later: "Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily." Especially enjoyable about this particular volume are the endnotes with which the editor follows up most letters. These brief but informed observations offer a fascinating and thorough glimpse into Dickinson's reading life, while also helping to illuminate her more obscure autobiographical allusions. This book is as fascinating an odyssey as Dickinson's complete poems, and I think readers do themselves a great service by delving into these letters alongside that more celebrated aspect of her genius.

Precious surviving fragments of a great oeuvre........2001-06-22

EMILY DICKINSON SELECTED LETTERS. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 364 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. SBN674-25060-5 (hbk).

Emily Dickinson was a great letter writer, in all senses of the word. In fact one gets the impression that she actually preferred writing to people, than meeting and conversing with them, and for her the arrival of a letter was a great event. A letter was something she looked forward to with keen anticipation, and which she savored to the full whenever one arrived.

The present selection of letters represents only a small proportion of the letters Emily Dickinson actually wrote. She was an inveterate letter-writer, had many correspondents, and wrote thousands of letters. And people in those days collected letters just as today.

Unfortunately it was the custom, whenever anyone died, to make a bonfire of all of their correspondence, probably because of its personal and confidential nature. In this way thousands of pages of Emily Dickinson's writings have been lost to posterity, and we would know much more aboute the details of her day-to-day life, and be able to date her poems more accurately, if it hadn't been for this tragic loss.

Just how great the loss is may be gaged by taking a look at the way Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith have treated her letters in 'Open Me Carefully : Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson' (1998). Whereas Thomas Johnson prints all of ED's letters as straight prose, which of course leads us to read them as straight prose, Hart-Smith give us their particular letters as they actually appear in the original draft - not as continous lines of prose but as very short lines with numerous line breaks - in other words, as poetry.

It would seem that at least some of ED's 'letters' are not so much letters as 'letter-poems,' and when read as poems produce a remarkable range of effects that are lost when all line breaks are removed and the 'letter' is regularized as straight prose. The loss of her letters now begins to look much more serious, for there seems to be a growing feeling among readers that her letters were every bit as great an artistic achievement as her poems.

Given this, the present book becomes something that should interest all serious students of ED, although before reading it they might (if they haven't already) take at look at the Hart-Smith, and keep it in mind while reading the Johnson. One wonders how much poetry may be lurking unrecognized in the regularized lines of 'Emily Dickinson's Selected Letters.'

A letter like immortality.......2000-05-20

...

Book Description

This Anchor edition includes both poems and letters, as well as the only contemporary description of Emily Dickinson, and is designed for readers who want the best poems and most interesting letters in convenient form. An excellent introduction to the work of a poet whose originality of thought remains unsurpassed in American poetry.

Customer Reviews:

A Mystery.......2000-03-17

I have come to believe that Emily Dickinson is the greatest writer America has produced. Unfortunately, the poet remained in anonymity and so went without constructive criticism. Her poems, while splendid, were not of the depth of Whitman nor the pleasure of Longfellow. They did not "live" like Poe's. But they lived; only heavier in breath. So it is not her poetry that we look at to find America's greatest writer, it is these wonderful letters. At thirteen her imagery is as complicated as Mailer or Morrison might ever be. And in our age of television, no genius will surpass these imaginings. To read Emily is to fall in love with her. Certainly misunderstood. Unapreciated. My copy of this books is weathered like a Baptist preachers Bible. It is my favorite book of all time. Emily is my favorite writer. Not everyone I recomend this book too enjoys it as much as I, but please try. You may find something special.

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A little light/ a slant concealed/ Emily D's/ soul revealed

Essential Dickinson CD
Emily Dickinson
Manufacturer: Caedmon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: 0061124214
Release Date: 2006-06-27

Book Description

Known as "The Myth of Amherst" for her withdrawal from society while still a young woman, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) had an inner life that was deeply emotional and intense. She knew rapture and despair, pondered the wonder of God and the meaning of death. She broke tradition and was criticized for her seminal experiments with unorthodox phrasing, rhyme and broken meter, within concise verse forms, thus becoming an innovator and forerunner of modern poets.

This collection of Emily Dickinson's poems is interspersed with her luminous and fascinating letters, all read by Julie Harris, who received a Tony ^® Award for her portrayal of Emily Dickinson in "The Belle of Amherst."

Customer Reviews:

A little light/ a slant concealed/ Emily D's/ soul revealed .......2007-03-30

Emily Dickison is one of the world's most memorable poets. This selection of her writing introduces us into her epigrammatic visionary verse-. There could not be a more appropriate person to introduce Emily, than another haunted inhabit of the deep literary imagination- Joyce Carol Oates.
Dickinson's verse stings and remains seared in the mind . It touches earth and tries Heaven in oblique inferences which shatter us out of our mental slumber.In subtle perceptions of metaphor it addresses the fundamental longings and distinctions of the human soul. It defines and redefines our feeling , in contracted language which expands the meaning we give to our own everyday lines.

"Exultation is the going of an inland soul to sea
Past the headlands, past the houses into deep eternity"

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Beautiful words and pictures
For whom is this intended and what is it's purpose?
problems
A Brief Introduction to Emily Dickinson.....

Emily Dickinson's Letters to the World

Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0374321477

Book Description

A captivating introduction to Emily Dickinson

The poet Emily Dickinson was unknown and mostly unpublished during her lifetime (1830–86). When she died, her sister, Lavinia, discovered the 1,775 poems Emily Dickinson left behind – her “letters to the world.” Jeanette Winter tells the story of the discovery of these poems and has selected twenty-one that speak most directly to children, surrounding them with vibrant paintings.

With a specifically designed typeface inspired by Emily Dickinson’s handwriting, this small book, which is about the size of some of the paper on which Emily wrote, is a gem.

Customer Reviews:

Beautiful words and pictures.......2006-03-03

The pictures in this book are vivid and appealing, and the selection of poems is very well-done. The poems included in the book feature striking images and simple language that will appeal to children.
I agree with other reviewers that the "biography" portion is a little flat and doesn't give much information at all about the poet--but it's enough to whet the appetite of a young reader who may want to seek out more detailed sources to learn more about Emily Dickinson.
For a parent who wants to read some good poetry aloud with their child, this is just right.

For whom is this intended and what is it's purpose?.......2003-08-04

While it is a nice premise - Emily's sister Lavinia discovers her sister's poems - the book falls a bit flat. The tone feels a bit condescending and dramatic in its attempt to engage young readers, and the narrative stops abruptly, launching into the poems with no commentary. The letters to the world theme is hammered into the reader's head, mentioned no less than five times if one includes the subtitle.
The poems are printed in a spidery script to distinguish them from the narrative. The font may be difficult for the beginning readers the book seems to be intended for. The selections are a diverse mix of her familiar and lessen known poems, including "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" and "There is no frigate like a book."
The illustrations are lovely, with a smooth solid folk art look to them. Emily appears in each drawing, making it clear that we are seeing the world through her eyes. Although each poem (and therefore illustration) is quite different, a common motif of scattered flowers, leaves and stars and graceful undulating arcs repeat in the forms of branches, waves and earth, tying the volume together. A short note at the end divulges additional biographical information. Sources are cited.
The small size, simple language and bright pictures make this a nice choice for young readers, but it is not as well done as The Mouse of Amherst by Elizabeth Spires (Francis Foster, 1999) or Emily Dickinson: Poetry for Young People by Emily Dickinson (Sterling, 1994).

problems.......2002-05-30

It was a wonderful idea, but I was disappointed by the book. In my view the illustrations are stylized, sterile, and off-putting - you can see if you agree with me by enlarging the cover and taking a look at it - , the graphic design and color patterns produced visual clutter, and the poems are in not-easy-to-read stylized italics. But what prompted me to comment was the alteration of language of at least one, and I suspect more than one, of the poems. The eight-line poem I checked begins: "I'm nobody. Who are you?" In Ms. Winter's book line four of this poem substitutes "advertise" for "banish us," line six substitutes "frog" for "fog," and line seven substitutes "June" for "day." As you can see for yourself, these changes degrade the poem. I suppose this is considered legitimate bowdlerization, given the audience. I don't agree. In any event the author and editors were remiss in failing to include a notice that at least one of the poems was altered.

A Brief Introduction to Emily Dickinson............2002-04-08

"My sister Emily was buried today..." So begins Jeanette Winter's very brief biography of poet, Emily Dickinson. Narrated by her sister, Lavinia, as she cleans out Emily's room, we learn just a few small facts about the elusive poet. She was a recluse who lived in the smallest upstairs room of the family's house. She loved words, studied the dictionary, and spent all her time writing on scraps of paper. She wore only white dresses, and most townfolk thought her strange. After her death, Lavinia finds drawers full of those scraps of paper, Emily's "letters to the world," and Ms Winter fills the rest of this small volume with a selection of 21 poems, some famous...There Is No Frigate Like A Book, I'm Nobody! Who Are You?, and If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking, and others less recognizable to complete her story. Her vibrant illustrations, done in an engaging folk art sytle, complement the text and enhances each poem beautifully. Though a bit light on biographical material, Emily Dickinson's Letters To The World is a simple and intriguing introduction to a remarkable poet that should open interesting discussions and whet the appetite of youngsters 7 and older, and send them out looking for more.

Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

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Mercy!
Open me not
Not a big Dickinson fan, but...
The Great Sue-Mabel Debate Continues
Her breast is fit for pearls

Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson
Emily Dickinson , Ellen Louise Hart , and Martha Nell Smith
Manufacturer: Paris Press
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0963818368

Amazon.com

Emily Dickinson is a figure of intense contradictions: the hermit, the spinster, the frail woman in white who nonetheless wrote poems of almost painfully turbulent passion. For years, biographers have speculated about the male mentor who inspired Dickinson's work, naming intellectual figures like Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Samuel Bowles as possible candidates. As it turns out, however, they might have looked closer to home. For years, both before and after a painful break in their relationship, Dickinson wrote ardent letters to her friend (and eventual sister-in-law) Susan Huntington Dickinson. In fact, she wrote more letters to Susan than to anyone else, despite the fact that at one point Susan lived only a stone's throw away. Like Dickinson's poetry, these letters are a curious business: half epistles, half poems, idiosyncratically capitalized, punctuated, and spaced. They are not merely warm, in the 19th-century way; they are fierce, even erotic, in the kind of attachment they express. Yet editors Ellen Hart and Martha Smith aren't in the business of outing anyone; they prefer to simply present the correspondence in all its passionate oddity. Susan Dickinson was clearly a friend as well as one of the most valued readers of her sister-in-law's poetry--but was she its inspiration, as well? Hart and Smith let the reader decide.

Book Description

For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence to her neighbor and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation.

For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson's poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet's life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster--here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive.

"With spare commentary, Smith ... and Hart ... let these letters speak for themselves. Most important, unlike previous editors who altered line breaks to fit their sense of what is poetry or prose, Hart and Smith offer faithful reproductions of the letters' genre-defying form as the words unravel spectacularly down the original page."-Renee Tursi, The New York Times Book Review

Customer Reviews:

Mercy! .......2005-09-16

My only disappointment with this book lies with myself for not having the frame of reference inre the Bible, the classics and the news & literature of the day, to give the writing presented here the depth and flavor so tantalizingly near. Though some things transcend meanings, of course, I felt a lack of reference too in the language private and shared only between correspondents. There is, through no fault of the editors, a very noticeable mostly silence where one woman's voice surely rang, whispered, shouted, strode in over four decades of on-going intelligent and warm, in the warmest sense, and yet often distant interaction. It left me, the book, feeling like I'd stumbled upon a treasure box of letters in a sunny attic aching for the second companion box to tell the rest of the story.

Open me not.......2005-06-06

Most of Emily Dickinson's letters have been public for a very long time and have been the center of a debate that started just after her death in 1886. The debate has been between two major factions: 1) Sue and her children, 2) Mabel Loomis Todd, Emily's brother's (Austin) mistress of 13 years and Mabel's children (and the relatives of the above mentioned and their descendants!)

Mabel Loomis Todd was 26 years younger than Sue and was the mistress of Sue's husband and Emily's brother, Austin. There was no love lost between Mabel and Sue. Mabel's knowledge of Emily came mostly from Austin with whom she was intimate for 13 years, and from Emily's poems and letters. Austin was very close to his sister, Emily during all of his life. (He lived next door to her with his wife Sue.) Mabel never met Emily face to face but by then Emily saw no one except old, trusted friends and was considered a recluse in Amherst.

"Open Me Carefully" comes down on the Sue side of the debate and discounts Mabel and Austin's point of view. (The authors refer to Austin and Mabel's affair only once, in passing, in the Introduction: "[Sue was] distracted by the loss [death] of Emily and by her husband's flagrant (my emphasis) affair with Mabel Loomis Todd...") But there is very little discussion of the different scholarly views and opinions of Emily's emotional life and even though there is an impressive number of footnotes at the end of the book, there is little evidence of scholarship in the book itself except for smoke that seems to rise from scholarly fires burning elsewhere.

The authors' introductory text strongly implies that Emily's feelings for Sue were sexual, even though the authors don't state this explicitly and never use the word 'lesbian.' For example on the first page of Section I, we are told "The letters from Emily to Susan and drafts of letters from Susan indicate that Susan is the object of passionate attachment for both brother and sister." On the second page of Section II we read: "These 'Dollie' (Sue's nickname) poems are deeply romantic and erotic..." In the Introduction we are told "The ardor of Dickinson's late teens and early twenties matured and deepened over the decades and the romantic and erotic expression from Emily to Susan continued until Dickinson's death in May 1886." In addition, the title of the book and the picture on its cover imply that Sue and Emily were related erotically or, dare I say, sexually?

The burden of "Open Me Carefully" should be to demonstrate that Emily and Sue had a life-long 'lesbian muse' relationship not simply to tell us they had one. Also, this book should not include any letters or poems that cannot be proved "beyond a reasonable doubt" to have been sent to Sue or intended for her. If consensus cannot be arrived at within the community of Dickinson scholars this fact should be clearly stated.

I should add that I think it is certainly possible that the theses of the book are true. I just don't believe that they have been proved or even demonstrated to be probably true.

Emily's letters and poems rate five stars but this arrangement of them isn't convincing and the extent of Sue's influence on Emily remains uncertain.

Not a big Dickinson fan, but..........2004-11-13

I still loved this book, and I think that reading her personal letters gave me more insight into her as a fellow human being, which in turn allowed me to take a new look at her poetry. This is one of the few books of letters I've read where I found that the footnotes were just as interesting as the letters themselves. There is so much information contained in this book that one would think it would be almost burdonsome (or boring) to read, but it's not. I have to say I prefer Dickinson's prose to her poetry. Her letters flow beautifully and are full of spirit and light and wit. I guess the short of it is that reading this book of letters helped me to better connect to her humanity. Of course, I have a passion for books of letters because there is something delicious about feeling as though you are a voyeur looking in on the most private parts of someone else's life. Somehow you can get a far more intimate and interesting view from someone's letters to another than you ever could by simply reading a biography.

Even if you aren't a fan of Dickinson, give this book a chance. Beauty is always worth a read.

The Great Sue-Mabel Debate Continues.......2004-11-10

As most of you know, the Sue-Mabel controversy began virtually at ED's death (Vinnie gave Sue first shot at editing ED's poems, then turned the job over to Mabel when Sue couldn't come through) and continues to this day, one of the most fascinating things in literary history. Sue and Mabel, and their respective daughters, were in a bitter competition to publish the ED poems in their control and to preserve their "place" in ED's history. In 1966, Sewall's ground-breaking ED biography primarily relied on the Mabel side for information, so a negative picture of Sue was created. The recent Habegger biography relied on the Sue side, and a more humane picture of Sue came out.

"Open Me Carefully" comes down firmly on the Sue side of the great divide, arguing for a much greater role in ED's life and work than heretofore granted Sue (though I don't think the author's views are quite as revolutionary as the authors claim). A lot of axes are ground here, and frankly, I disagreed with many of their conclusions. I don't think they took sufficient account of Sewall's point that ED presented a different "face" to each of her correspondents (though, as in so much else, Habegger disagrees), nor evaluated in a balanced way the similar or even greater passion ED brought in her correspondence to Bowles, Higginson, Lord, and others. There really is very little evidence that Sue (herself a rather mediocre poet) had any significant impact on ED's stunning style and insight.

Nonetheless, I gave it five stars for its presentation and its excellent explication of an argument that, while I don't agree with it, should be evaluated by all interested ED students.

Her breast is fit for pearls.......2003-07-31

Any Emily Dickinson historian or student will want this book. It contains the lost puzzle pieces, released by Sue's family, to the mysterious Emily Dickinson. Sue wanted this story told at the right time. The sheer talent in these writings is amazing. Here was a girl who spent her days as a recluse doing laundry and dishes and writing letters and carrying them around in her pockets. The pen and paper, written word, was what connected the lone Emily to her outside world, her loves, her friends, and now to the rest of us. A must have for any writer who studies her.

Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications

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Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications
William Merrill Decker
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture

ASIN: 0807847437
Release Date: 1998-10-28

Book Description

Letters have long been read as primary sources for biography and history, but their performative, fictive, and textual dimensions have only recently attracted serious notice. In this book, William Merrill Decker examines the place of the personal letter in American popular and literary culture from the colonial to the postmodern period.

Customer Reviews:

Charming, intimate letters of Emily Dickinson .......2004-07-23

This is a short but charming book from Amherst College Press, published for the centennial of Emily Dickinson?s 1886 death, edited with an introduction and manuscript comments by R. W. Franklin. Ralph Franklin is arguably the best current Dickinson manuscript scholar and also edited ?The Poems of Emily Dickinson?, to my eyes the current definitive edition of Dickinson.

The Master Letters are three letters, actually drafts of three letters, to a person Emily addresses as ?Master?. They are undated by Dickinson, but some sleuthing and careful handwriting analysis described in the introduction put them in a credible chronologic order. No other version of these letters or the other side of this correspondence is known. A wonderful mystery.

For decades only a fragment of one letter was known to the public, published with Dickinson poems because of the poetic qualities abundant in these letters. The full letters were suppressed, presumably because of their intimate emotional content. The mildest letter was published in 1931, the final two waited until 1955 for publication.

Because of Dickinson?s original and idiosyncratic use of punctuation, capitalization, and word and line spacing, it is currently fashionable to read Dickinson in the original, usually meaning reproductions of the handwritten originals. Standard print has no equivalent of her dashes of various lengths, for example. This text includes full page photographs of every page of the letters with a faithful printed version on the facing page. Plus, as a real treat, an insert envelope contains complete reproductions of all the original leaves. A beautiful touch. The hand of the author is very present in scratch outs, overwrites, and corrections - giving hints at Emily?s creative and editing process. The handwriting is clear and legible but takes some study to read fluidly.

I feel very close to Emily Dickinson reading and holding these letters. This text is a must for Dickinson fans, and will be appreciated by many bibliophiles and scholars.

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