Lapham's Spends Time With Emily Dickinson

For those craving more of Emily Dickinson's universe, consider checking out this constellated survey by Jaime Fuller, recently published at Lapham's Quarterly, which ties together additional information about the great thinkers who Dickinson mentions in her notes and letters. "As much as Emily Dickinson is falsely portrayed as a recluse, her letters and reading habits show that she was constantly absorbing the world and transposing it into her poetry between en dashes," Fuller writes. From there: 

For all of those who have ever thought, “I wish a dead poet could recommend books to me” (this is probably a short list of people), here is a reading list drawn from some of the writers and books Dickinson mentioned most in her letters, or according to those who knew her.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

After Dickinson died in 1886, Thomas Wentworth Higginson—an abolitionist who, like Robert Gould, commanded a black regiment in South Carolina during the Civil War—described their decades-long correspondence in The Atlantic. She first wrote to him after he published lessons for young authors in the same magazine. Her short note began, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Over the years, the pair often swapped reading recommendations. She sent him a copy of Daniel Deronda, telling him that “to abstain from [the book] is hard.” (A picture of Mary Ann Evans hung in Dickinson’s room, and she often gushed about how much she loved the woman who wrote under the pen name George Eliot.) He, in turn, recommended the short story “Circumstance,” written by another one of the female authors he championed, Harriet Prescott Spofford.

After devouring it, she wrote him that “it followed me in the dark, so I avoided her.” In the same letter, she spoke of Whitman: “I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful.” She also often read Higginson’s own work. His first book, Outdoor Papers, she told him “is still as distinct as Paradise…It was Mansions – Nations – Kinsmen – too – to me.” Dickinson was perhaps flattering him a bit—she often did so, as Brenda Wineapple notes in White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. But she kept reading his work and commenting on it. After the poet died, her own work was finally published, thanks in part to Higginson, who oversaw the death of many of the dashes essential to her art. It took decades before the public saw her words in the same pristine condition as Higginson did as they were first sent to him in the post.

Read more at Lapham's Quarterly.