Claire Harman at Literary Review:
‘A Letter is a joy of Earth –/It is denied the Gods’, Emily Dickinson wrote in 1885, a year before she died, aged fifty-five, at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was a joy she indulged freely. This monumental new edition of her correspondence contains 1,304 items, including all the previously published letters, further uncollected material and some two hundred ‘letter-poems’. Still, all this represents just a fraction of Dickinson’s total correspondence.
Dickinson, famously, published only ten poems during her life, though some nine hundred more were found among her effects after her death, bound into small, homemade booklets. Writing wasn’t a secret activity; her family were aware and supportive of it, as was the journalist Samuel Bowles, whom Dickinson met at her brother’s house, and the influential critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson (her correspondence with him started when she sent him four poems after reading an article he had published in the Atlantic Monthly).
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.