In the new, expanded ‘Letters of Emily Dickinson,’ get to know the poet like never before

The first collection of letters by poet Emily Dickinson in nearly 70 years includes 1,304 documents – 300 of them previously uncollected – as well as selected letters from correspondents and more than 200 “letter-poems,” which Dickinson sent in correspondence without accompanying prose. 

For the new “The Letters of Emily Dickinson,” Cristanne Miller of the State University of New York and Domhnall Mitchell of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (each with three previous Dickinson books of their own) redated much of her correspondence and added context with updated annotations. The new collection from the Harvard University Press comes out Wednesday, and Miller speaks that evening at Cambridge Public Library. We interviewed her Tuesday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired this exploration into Dickinson’s letters?

The last time Dickinson’s letters were edited was in 1958, published in a volume also called “The Letters of Emily Dickinson” and edited by Thomas Herbert Johnson, so a new edition was long overdue. Dickinson was not even that famous in 1958; a true critical biography, with all the letters and all the poems and so on, had not been written yet. Since the book was published, 80 some letters have been either discovered or so radically re-edited that they’re like new letters, so there was a lot of new material to go on. And the annotations in that book were just hopelessly out of date – every woman in the volume was referred to only by her husband’s name, so you had absolutely no idea who they were in their own right, even though they were Dickinson’s friends – so there were multiple reasons to make both an updated and more complete edition of the letters. My co-editor Domhnall Mitchell started asking me if I would edit the letters with him for the first time around 2010. I said no at the time, because I was working on her poems, editing my book “Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them,” but encouraged him to do it. He said he couldn’t do it alone, so he spent a few years gathering information about where the letters were housed, dates and timelines, things like that, and then I joined him in really working on the letters in 2016 after the poems came out.

What did the process entail, and how are they organized in the book?

Most of the letters are housed either in the Frost Library at Amherst College or in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, so that part was easy, and the librarians at both institutions are just marvelous and helped us with everything we needed. To find the more hidden ones, we relied in part on the 1958 edition, and in part on other scholarship. We knew about a lot of letters that had been published, but they were scattered, so there might be one letter in this journal, one letter in another journal. We collected all that information and figured out where those letters were, and we had help – people got in touch with us, got in touch with the Houghton. We went to a lot of libraries and private collections: California, Washington, D.C., South Carolina. Our goal was to look at every single manuscript in person, to hold it in our hands, but that effort was disrupted by the pandemic. Since libraries had to close, at that point we had to ask librarians if they would share digital copies with us, so there are some letters we’ve only seen in digital copy. And then there are a few letters that we were not able to see at all because they’ve gone into private hands, but those letters had either been previously transcribed or we were able to find digital copies on an auction site, for instance. So although we didn’t get to hold all the letters, we did see every single one. In terms of organization, we organized the letters chronologically because it seemed to us the most useful way to do it. We wanted this volume of letters to give a better sense of Dickinson’s life in the world than the old collection of letters had, and so by presenting the letters chronologically, it’s easier to see the narrative arc, to read the story.

What’s especially interesting about this collection? 

Dickinson mailed a lot of poems to people with absolutely no prose accompaniment; it would just be a poem and either a salutation or a “love, Emily.” In the 1958 edition, I think maybe three or four of those “letter-poems” were included among the other letters. We’ve included an additional 215. Another thing, and another difference from the 1958 edition, is that we’ve highlighted her writing notes. In the 1958 edition, the editors included a section at the end of the volume called “prose fragments,” where they collected all the pieces of paper on which Dickinson had written things other than poems. We looked at those pieces of paper and thought, those aren’t prose fragments, those are writing notes, the kind of notes that poets and other writers take today. We noticed that in at least three cases, Dickinson actually wrote several of these notes on the same page with a line in between them, and she had done so exactly the same way when she copied out poems she wanted to keep. It seemed very clear to us that these were things she wanted to preserve, that she might come back to. And we know that she used some of those phrases in letters, and in one case in a poem, so we decided to reorganize, retitle and redate those writing notes, and that’s another thing that’s unique about this volume. The third thing, and this has entirely delighted us, has been pointed out by several reviewers. They said that the 1958 edition did not encourage you to sit down and read it through, beginning to end, and that when they picked this one up they thought it would be the same thing. But instead, they said, not that it was like a novel, but it has a narrative arc and they just wanted to read the whole thing straight through. We’re utterly pleased by that because that’s the way we hoped the volume would be used, that people would read it to get a sense of who Dickinson was and who she was writing to, and a much fuller sense of her life and her life in the world than nonscholars have had before.

Have you learned anything about Dickinson from putting this together?

The thing that became supremely clear to me that I hadn’t really understood or realized before is how actively involved she was with a community of neighbors for the last 10 years of her life. She sent not only gifts of food and flowers to her neighbors, but these loving, expressive notes. She thanked them for things that they sent to her, we know that she was sending them things too. She seemed to be part of this community exchange of gift-giving – I’m sending you some eggs, or some honey, or I just made some compote so here’s some for you, whatever it might be. These little notes like that along with food or flowers are, to me, a sign that she wasn’t this isolated, depressed hermit that she’s often made out to be. She was expressing love and gratitude to a lot of people for the care that they were taking of her. She was part of a community.

What can less-familiar readers learn about Dickinson from her letters? 

This sense that Dickinson was involved in community. She loved a lot of people, and they loved her, and she wrote to them all the time. Another thing that really comes out in our volume is how funny she is; she is caustic and witty and ironic and silly. I think the fact that a lot of her letters are just poems signifies that for her, the writing of poetry and the writing of letters are not altogether separate. She sent out over 500 poems to various people, but interestingly, the poems that she mailed to people are for the most part not the poems that we think of as her most famous. (If you know the poems, you will see a difference between what she’s circulating and what she isn’t.) In large part, she was just writing about her world, which new readers will notice: “there was a storm today,” or a poem about a snowstorm. Beyond what was happening in the weather or her garden, Dickinson kept up with national politics and international politics as well as contemporary literature. She quoted from Charles Dickens in all kinds of ways, and from Alfred Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and she took it for granted that her friends would also have read their works and know what she’s talking about. When George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” came out, she wrote to her cousins, who had evidently asked if she read it, “What do I think of ‘Middlemarch?’ What do I think of glory?” We tried to include, in our annotations, just how involved she was in reading newspapers and pointing to things that were happening in the world. 

Cristanne Miller reads from “The Letters of Emily Dickinson” at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Cambridge Public Library, Main Branch, 449 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge. Free.

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