Authors

Three volumes of The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) were edited by Thomas H. Johnson; and Johnson and Theodora Ward edited three companion volumes of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958). R. W. Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981) provides, in two volumes, facsimile reproductions of the hand-sewn poems Dickinson left at her death in fascicles. R. W. Franklin’s three-volume Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998) now supersedes Johnson’s three-volume Poems. In 1999 Franklin published the one-volume The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Important biographies include Richard B. Sewall’s The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974), Cynthia Griffin Wolff ’s Emily Dickinson (1986), and Alfred Habegger’s My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (2001). Jay Leyda’s The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1960) is two volumes of documents, such as excerpts from family letters. Additional documents are in Vivian Pollak’s A Poet’s Parents: The Courtship Letters of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson (1988), Polly Longsworth’s The World of Emily Dickinson (1990), and Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith’s Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (1998). Research tools include Joseph Duchac’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Guide to Commentary Published in English, 1890– 1977 (1979), and the continuation (published in 1993) covering 1978–89; Karen Dandurand’s Dickinson Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography 1969–1985 (1988), and the treasure trove compiled by Willis J. Buckingham (drawing on Mabel Loomis Todd’s scrapbooks), Emily Dickinson’s Reception in the 1890s (1989). Also useful are S. P. Rosenbaum’s A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson (1964), Cynthia J. MacKenzie’s Concordance to the Letters of Emily Dickinson (2000), Joel Myerson’s Emily Dickinson: A Descriptive Bibliography (1984), and Jane Donahue Eberwein’s An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia (1998). The Dickinson Electronic Archives <www.emilydickinson.org>, directed by Martha Nell Smith with Ellen Louise Hart, Lara Vetter, and Marta Werner, offers more than access to many of Dickinson’s manuscripts. Also available are many out-of-print volumes about Dickinson as well as never-before-published writings by various family members. Edited collections of critical essays provide an excellent introduction to Dickinson studies. See Susan Juhasz’s Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson (1983), Judith Farr’s Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays (1996), Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller’s The Emily Dickinson Handbook (1998, 2006), Wendy Martin’s The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (2002), and Vivian R. Pollak’s A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson (2004), and Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz’s A Companion to Emily Dickinson (2007). Recent important studies include Paula Bennett’s Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet (1990), Judith Farr’s The Passion of Emily Dickinson (1992), Martha Nell Smith’s Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992), Sharon Cameron’s Choosing, Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles (1993), Domhnall Mitchell’s Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception (2000), Eleanor Elson Heginbotham’s Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson (2003), and Virginia Walker Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005).

A life-long resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson left her hometown for only one year, when she attended Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary. She was raised in an intellectual and socially prominent family and at the age of eighteen had received a better formal education than most of her American contemporaries, both male and female. Yet Dickinson led a largely sequestered existence, and she devoted much of her time to writing poetry, producing close to eighteen hundred poems, which were characterized by terse lines, "slant" rhymes, and keen observation. Although most of Dickinson's work was not published in her lifetime, she did see three small collections of poems printed (1890, 1891, and 1896). A half-century later, the three volumes of The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) and two volumes of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958) appeared.