The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller & Domhnall Mitchell

The Letters of Emily Dickinson

edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024

In the popular imagination, Emily Dickinson was a reclusive spinster, locked away in her private upstairs bedroom—as were hundreds and hundreds of her poems, discovered only after her death. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, prove this vision to be untrue. Although Dickinson did spend much of her later years at home, she wrote a huge number of letters to maintain relationships and to create friendships anew. She was “by no means an isolated, lonely, woman,” the editors say. Instead, she was deeply connected to the world around her.

Miller and Mitchell have produced the first complete collection of Dickinson’s correspondence made available since the 1950s. In addition to including hundreds of documents unearthed since the previous publication, they re-date many letters, basing their decisions on careful triangulation of everything from events described in local newspapers to the timing of blooms in the poet’s garden.

Dickinson’s correspondence reflected her life as a genteel nineteenth-century New England woman. She cooked for her family regularly, managed a garden and shared its bounty, and cared for her ill family members. Writing letters about such domestic matters kept Dickinson closely connected to her neighbors and friends even when she rarely left home.

Dickinson sought to engage her correspondents in other ways, too. In one of her earliest letters, she asked a question she was to ask for the rest of her life: “What are you reading now?” Her mentions of her own reading was never meant to be sophisticated literary criticism; instead, it was personal and emotional, intended to facilitate social connection. She chatted about contemporary authors including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, and George Eliot. Dickinsin’s opinion of Eliot’s biggest novel was soaring: “’What do I think of Middlemarch?’ What do I think of glory?” Often, her quips were more playful. When a friend told her that her cellar had been inundated with sewage, Dickinson shot back, “Your flight from the ‘Sewer’ reminded me of the ‘Mill on the Floss,’ though ‘Maggie Tulliver’ was missing.” Her comment was relationship-fostering banter between bookish friends.

During the nineteenth century, it was a duty for women to write condolence letters to anyone who had experienced the loss of a loved one. Dickinson understood the intensity surrounding death and dying: “I know there is no pang like that for those we love,” she told one correspondent, “but Dying is a Wild Night and a new Road.” She immediately softened: “The subject hurts me so that I will put it down, because it hurts you.” But grief brought more than just sadness; caring for grieving friends, and being cared for when one experienced loss oneself, further developed bonds within the community.

Dickinson’s friendships were sometimes quite intimate, and even this kind of relationship was maintained at least partly through written correspondence. Emily wrote three widely-studied “Master” letters—perhaps to a specific person, perhaps to an imaginary person, or perhaps as a way to explore “the language of desire and devotion,” as the editors say. Both extant letters and external evidence suggest that later in her life, Dickinson may have had a romantic and possibly sexual relationship with Otis Lord, to whom she wrote flirtatious letters full of double entendres. That Dickinson appears to have had erotic relationships should not shock us, given that some of her poetry includes lines such as “Wild Nights—Wild Nights! / Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our luxury!”

Her longest intimate relationship was with Susan Gilbert. Emily made her longing for Susan clear in her letters: “Oh my darling one, how long you wander from me, how weary I grow of waiting and looking, and calling for you,” wrote Dickinson. “Sometimes I shut my eyes, and shut my heart towards you, and try hard to forget you because you grieve me so, but you’ll never go away.” Sometimes her longing was expressed as physical desire: “The expectation… to see your face again makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast.” Scholars have argued that their long-lasting relationship—one which continued even after Susan’s marriage to Emily’s brother Austin—went well beyond the nineteenth-century “female world of love and ritual” that accepted romantic relationships between women but stressed the primacy of heterosexual marriage. In this case, however, Susan may have been the love of Emily’s life.

The poet discussed her writing with several writers and editors, especially Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Helen Hunt Jackson. In addition to this professional dialogue, she sent poetry to close friends. A great number went to Susan, who offered feedback Emily took seriously. “I am not suited dear Emily with the second verse,” Susan wrote in response to an early draft of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.” The stanza did “not go with the ghostly shimmer of the first verse.” After thinking through Susan’s critique, Emily sent her an edited version of the poem and the two conversed again. To use literary scholar Martha Nell Smith’s words, Emily’s relationship was not just sexual but textual.

When Miller and Mitchell collected Dickinson’s letters, they faced an uncommon complication: the excision of sections of transcriptions as well as “intentional mutilation” of some original letters. Excision was done by the poet’s first posthumous editor, Mabel Loomis Todd (Austin’s long-time lover), who sometimes cut out sections from Dickinson’s letters to a childhood friend and then pasted the cut-out words to a separate page. The excised letters are held by Yale University, but the sheets of pasted excisions are at Amherst College—requiring the editors to reunite text from separate repositories. The reconstructed letters “reveal a witty teenaged Dickinson,” explains the editors, “who describes her life and acquaintances more uninhibitedly than previous renditions of the correspondence reveal.”

A more “spectacular instance” of literary mutilation than Todd’s scissoring was the deliberate removal of Susan Gilbert from Emily’s letters. Her name was literally erased, although it is still often legible. Sometimes pronouns were changed: an “s” could be removed to transform “she” into “he,” for example, or the last two letters of “her” could be erased and rewritten to become “him.” The editors suggest that Todd might have been removing the name of her rival—or that Austin might have been trying to disguise Emily’s romantic attachment to Susan.

Miller and Mitchell include notes for each letter, identifying individuals mentioned in each letter and providing references to Dickinson’s allusions and quotations. Their annotations make Dickinson’s letters accessible to general readers, including those who might be relatively unfamiliar with the details of Dickinson’s life. The collection will also, of course, be of tremendous value to future biographers and literary scholars.

Hannah Joyner lives in Washington, D.C. She earned her bachelor's degree at Harvard University and her Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Unspeakable and From Pity to Pride. You can find her on Booktube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.