Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris Press) - Softcover

Dickinson, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0963818368 ISBN 13: 9780963818362

Publisher: Paris Press, 1998

Synopsis

For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. 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. "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." Renee Tursi, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

About this title

Review:

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.

About the Author:

Emily Dickinson is the great and iconic American poet. She lived in Amherst, MA and was largely unrecognized during her lifetime. Her poems are as original in form and subject today as when she wrote them. Ellen Louise Hart is the author of articles on editing Emily Dickinson that have appeared in The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Emily Dickinson Journal, An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, The Women's Review of Books, and The Heath Anthology of American Literature. She teaches writing and literature at Portland Community College in Oregon. Martha Nell Smith is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Professor of English, and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. Her numerous print publications include five singly and coauthored books, including Emily Dickinson, A User's Guide, Companion to Emily Dickinson, and Rowing in Eden.

About this edition

• Publisher: Paris Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0963818368
• ISBN 13: 9780963818362
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 315
• Editor: Hart Ellen Louise, Smith Martha Nell