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.


From Library Journal
This intriguing new collection of letters and poems, compiled by two noted Dickinson scholars, reveals a little-known side of one of America's best-loved poets. Documenting a 36-year correspondence between Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, the book does much to negate the popular image of Emily as a mysterious, lonely recluse. In writing filled with warmth, humor, playfulness, and joy, Emily shows her profound attachment to Susan as a friend and as an object of literary inspiration. The romantic and often erotically charged writings, censored or misinterpreted in earlier collections, will surprise many readers. Building upon standard works such as Thomas Johnson's Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), Hart and Smith revise earlier scholarship and provide fresh commentary. Published by a highly selective feminist press that typically produces only two titles per year, this book is an important acquisition for academic and larger public libraries.?Ellen Sullivan, Ferguson Lib., Stamford, CTCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Renee Tursi
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.


Book Description
Letters. 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 dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. "As this correspondence shows ... Emily and Susan's relationship surpasses in depth, passion, and continuity the stereotype of the 'intimate exchange' between women friends of the period. The ardor of Dickinson's late teens and early twenties matured and deepened over the decades, and the romantic and erotic expressions from Emily to Susan continued until Dickinson's death in May 1886" (from the Introduction) Includes a selected bibliography and index.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

This intriguing new collection of letters and poems, compiled by two noted Dickinson scholars, reveals a little-known side of one of America's best-loved poets. Documenting a 36-year correspondence between Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, the book does much to negate the popular image of Emily as a mysterious, lonely recluse. In writing filled with warmth, humor, playfulness, and joy, Emily shows her profound attachment to Susan as a friend and as an object of literary inspiration. The romantic and often erotically charged writings, censored or misinterpreted in earlier collections, will surprise many readers. Building upon standard works such as Thomas Johnson's Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), Hart and Smith revise earlier scholarship and provide fresh commentary. Published by a highly selective feminist press that typically produces only two titles per year, this book is an important acquisition for academic and larger public libraries.--Ellen Sullivan, Ferguson Lib., Stamford, CT

Booknews

A compilation of selections from Emily Dickinson's 36-year correspondence to her neighbor and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, inviting a new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work. This correspondence brings to light Susan Huntington Dickinson as the central source of the poet's passion and inspiration, and as her primary reader and literary companion. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Renee Tursi

With spare commentary. .. [the authors] wisely let these letters speak for themselves. . . .All the better to appreciate. . .that poetic voice we have come to know. . . -- The New York Times Book Review

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Blanche Weisen Cook