The Letters of Emily Dickinson

[This] new monumental volume of Dickinson's letters, the first in over 60 years, gives us an engaged Emily Dickinson, a woman in conversation with the world through gossip, as well as remarks about books, politics and the signal events of her age, particularly the Civil War…reads like the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an intimate autobiography of the poet. -- Maureen Corrigan * Fresh Air *
There has never been a better time to revisit and restore the author’s charismatic, sensitive, and characteristically brilliant prose…What is made plain in these letters is that the reality is far more wondrous than the prefab myth of Dickinson that has so long existed, in part, to rationalize how so extraordinary a mind could come by its power. -- Maya C. Popa * Poetry Foundation *
A new, definitive edition that collects, reorders, and freshly annotates every surviving letter that Dickinson sent (or drafted) to someone else, along with the handful of surviving messages that she received. -- Kamran Javadizadeh * New Yorker *
The concentrated intensity with which…[Dickinson] produced…[her] best work has the quality of a natural phenomenon: a butterfly migration, or a swarm of plankton ablaze with bioluminescence. To read The Letters of Emily Dickinson is to experience this phenomenon in real-time. -- Claire Lowdon * The Spectator *
Monumental…Miller and Mitchell can be proud of the work they have done collating, checking and sometimes redating the letters (ingeniously using Amherst weather records, among other sources). Their new presentation of Dickinson’s letters will send you back to the poems with fresh eyes, and make you wonder afresh too about the dazzling, challenging writer behind them. -- Claire Harman * Literary Review *
[A] welcome new edition…Miller and Mitchell’s major achievement lies in their framing of Dickinson herself to reflect how attitudes about her — and even about what constitutes a Dickinson letter — have changed since the mid-twentieth century…Although Dickinson sent hundreds of gifts, each accompanied by a letter, for her the letter itself (given or received) was the true gift, a belief that this new edition amply confirms. -- Meg Schoerke * Hudson Review *
An illuminating contextualization of many poems originally sent as correspondence. What we might previously have read as freestanding poems we now see as part of a flow of conversation…every letter is potentially of interest and importance…[this] new edition of Dickinson’s letters grants us, as well, an expanded view of a great poet, admitting us as never before to the kingdom of possibility that was her mind. -- Sally Thomas * National Review *
What is there to be said of the new, expanded edition of the Letters of the great nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson? Only this. That it is one of the most delightful gatherings of a lifetime’s correspondence that anyone could ever wish to read: odd, spirited, soul-warming, hilarious, philosophical. No other poet has looked at the world quite so breathlessly side-on as Emily did. -- Michael Glover * The Tablet *
This new [volume],…the first that aspires to completeness in more than sixty years, adds to Johnson and Ward the eighty letters discovered and published since 1958, presents the correspondence newly transcribed, redated and annotated, and – in perhaps its most significant editorial decision – adds to this epistolary haul 200 poems that, because they carry an address or signature, or both, are counted as letters. There could be no better undertakers of this complex and much-needed task than Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell. -- Fiona Green * Times Literary Supplement *
The edition is everything we need…[it] rescues the letters from the stacks of the university library and thus from the sense that they are only to be referred to, rather than read…[Miller and Mitchell] took on the responsibility of compiling the letters of a Dickinson so much more public, more networked and more political than Johnson and Ward’s, and that meant reckoning with her poetry not just as writing by but also as writing to…[they] have enabled that gainful endeavor with style, rigour, and a willing embrace of difficulty. -- Jamie Fenton * Review of English Studies *
The first complete collection of Dickinson’s correspondence made available since the 1950s…[the editors’] 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 * Open Letters Review *
Emily Dickinson’s poems can be read as letters to the world and immortality and her letters as poetic utterances from an exquisite mind. Her letters offer a considerable resource in any effort to interpretate and situate her poetry, often embedded, or set within letters as well as most often a letter in itself. They are a joy to read in themselves and have an extraordinary range of registers and are full of literary allusions…The editors have produced a wonderfully accessible book with considerable cross-referencing of letters and poems, correspondents' biographies, including less well known townspeople, a useful introduction, Emily's miscellaneous writings, recipes, and a selected bibliography to add to our understanding of this exceptional woman. -- David Caddy * Tears in the Fence *
This extraordinary collection shows [Dickinson] to be a masterful prose writer…An exciting new standard in Dickinson scholarship. * Kirkus Reviews *
This brilliantly expansive and comprehensive collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters shows us just how deeply she was embedded in her social world. Here we see, in Dickinson’s own words, a writer exchanging ideas with a wide circle of friends and family members, honing her abilities as a poet, and grappling with a nation torn by war over slavery and race. In these letters, we see the life of a genius unfold. -- Jericho Brown, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Drawing deeply on more than three decades of editorial scholarship, Miller and Mitchell give us a Dickinson both inseparable from her own time and indispensable to ours. Meticulously edited from archival sources and annotated with immense care, this work overwhelmingly shows that both Dickinson’s poems and her letters issue from a singular impetus: to seek in language—often formally experimental, always compelling—new ways to express the strangeness and beauty of our experiences as finite beings in the world. -- Marta Werner, author of Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours
A thrilling read that wholly immerses us in Dickinson’s world. It seems Dickinson thought in poetry, as the characteristic cadence of her poems recurs in the letters themselves. Especially fascinating is the continuity of her long flirtatious argument with God, taken up in correspondence with her school friends, with eminent public figures, and in the poems she enclosed. Miller and Mitchell present a masterfully curated abundance. To read it is to encounter a mind on fire. -- Rae Armantrout, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
The Letters of Emily Dickinson provides a vital window into not only the poet’s inner life and art, but also her surprisingly wide social world. Miller and Mitchell, two of our foremost Dickinson scholars, have produced a fresh, definitive edition for the twenty-first century, tracking the relationship of poems to letters and precisely locating these treasures in their time and place. -- Bonnie Costello, coeditor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore