‘A Letter is a joy of Earth –/It is denied the Gods’, Emily Dickinson wrote in 1885, a year before she died, aged fifty-five, at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was a joy she indulged freely. This monumental new edition of her correspondence contains 1,304 items, including all the previously published letters, further uncollected material and some two hundred ‘letter-poems’. Still, all this represents just a fraction of Dickinson’s total correspondence. 

Dickinson, famously, published only ten poems during her life, though some nine hundred more were found among her effects after her death, bound into small, homemade booklets. Writing wasn’t a secret activity; her family were aware and supportive of it, as was the journalist Samuel Bowles, whom Dickinson met at her brother’s house, and the influential critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson (her correspondence with him started when she sent him four poems after reading an article he had published in the Atlantic Monthly).

The editors of this volume of Dickinson’s letters, Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, are keen to emphasise that she was by no means as reclusive as previously thought – stay-at-home, certainly (she hardly ever went anywhere, seemingly from choice), but with a wide circle of acquaintances and the outlook of a professional writer, even if she didn’t develop a professional career. She was an avid and engaged consumer of contemporary writing, reading the Brontës and Elizabeth Barrett Browning hot off the press, and quoting David Copperfield familiarly the year following its publication.

Right from the start, her letters reveal a young woman made of highly flammable material. When she sends a valentine, it is a showstopper that gets published in the local college magazine (‘Sir, I desire an interview; meet me at sunrise, or sunset, or the new moon – the place is immaterial. In gold, or in purple, or sackcloth – I look not upon the raiment’). When she has a cold, she writes hundreds of words describing how ‘it has slept in my bed, eaten from my plate, lived with me every­where, and will tag me through life for all I know’. If her object is to entertain the recipient, she doesn’t exactly do that. The feeling and the rhetoric are too relentless. She is always ardent and often theatrical; the only correspondent with whom she adopts a truly relaxed tone is her brother Austin. Here there are touches of drollery, such as when she tells him that their mutual friend Sanford has become idiotic since finding out he is to be the class valedictorian. And she scolds him, ‘the next time you a’nt going to write me I’d thank you to let me know.’

The letters are mostly about home, seen through the prism of her brilliantly slant mind and packed tight with emotion. She was known locally as ‘the Myth’, and was perhaps keen to promote this identity, though it’s hard to decide whether she relished or feared sharing her thoughts with others. The long list of people she had passionate feelings towards includes Charles Wadsworth, Samuel Bowles, Otis Lord and her sister-in-law Susan, whom she habitually addresses as a lover: ‘And now how soon I shall have you, shall hold you in my arms; you will forgive the tears, Susie, they are so glad to come that it is not in my heart to reprove them and send them home.’ Lord was an elderly judge and a friend of Dickinson’s father who became close to her after his wife’s death in 1877. ‘Oh, my too beloved, save me from the idolatry which would crush us both,’ she wrote to him in October 1880. But the words survive only in a pencil draft or a fair copy, and it’s not clear that Dickinson ever sent them. 

The three famous ‘Master’ letters (addressee unknown) must rank among the most cryptic love notes ever written: ‘Wonder stings me more than the Bee – who never did sting me – but made gay music with his might wherever I may should did go – Wonder wastes my pound, you said I had no size to spare’; ‘Have you the heart in your breast – Sir – is it set like mine – a little to the left – has it the misgiving – if it wake in the night – perchance – itself to it – a timbrel is it – itself to it a tune?’ Unanswerable, surely – if they were ever sent.

Did she want to be published? I think it’s harder than ever to tell. She told Higginson that ‘My Barefoot – Rank is better’ than fame, and, at a later date, claimed he had saved her life, but whether that was because he had published four of her poems or because he had published only four is unclear. You could well get the feeling, reading these letters, that Dickinson felt most in control keeping things the way things were.

All her writings show the singular habits of mind and ear that made her such a great poet. You hear it in the iambic metre to which her prose defaults (‘I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or home’) and in the fragments that sometimes emerge from the letters into the poems, and vice versa. She blurs the boundaries between different genres all the time. She also can’t resist recycling phrases she is particularly pleased with. This was, for me, the big revelation of this edition, which includes a selection of Dickinson’s writing notes, ‘The little sentences I begun and never finished – the little wells I dug and never filled’, many of which share the off-kilter aphoristic tone that is so characteristic of her poetry: ‘Nothing is so old as a dilapidated charm’; ‘Train up a Heart in the way it should go and as quick as it can – twill depart from it’. The impression is of a woman nurturing and preserving her own eloquence, and the letters provide some surprising examples of not wanting to let any of the best bits slip. That remark about a letter being ‘a joy of Earth’, for instance, was sent to two different correspondents on two separate occasions. The opening sentence of a letter to Higginson in 1869 – ‘A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend’ – was repeated almost verbatim in one sent to her friend James D Clark thirteen years later.

By the late 1860s, Dickinson was not just staying at home almost the whole time; she had also started speaking to visitors from the other side of a closed door. She watched her father’s funeral, which took place in the hallway of their home, through a crack in the same door. Her family facilitated this eccentric behaviour and protected her solitude. Mabel Loomis Todd, the woman who would become Dickinson’s posthumous editor and who from 1883 onwards was engaged in a highly disruptive affair with Austin Dickinson, used to come round to the Homestead, the Dickinson house in Amherst, to play the piano. But she never, in all the years she knew the family, set eyes on Emily.

You won’t find that story, or any sort of biographical extras, in this edition. The editors’ annotations provide ‘only information necessary for the appreciation of the letter at hand’. Curious readers must make do with an index of correspondents, which will tell you, for instance, that Susan Dickinson was ‘ED’s most intimate friend’. That’s not a lot of help. The index of names is similarly ungenerous, listing strings of page numbers with no subcategories, inadequate for navigating a book so large and a subject so complex.

But 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. When Higginson did finally get to meet Dickinson in 1870, he was fascinated by her, but also alarmed by her loquacity. ‘I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much,’ he wrote, as if he’d met a vampire. ‘I am glad not to live near her.’ Dickinson emerges from this edition less knowable than before, less smooth a concept, certainly, than the quirky and charming ‘Belle of Amherst’ of William Luce’s highly popular 1976 play. As a reader in the here and now, I feel very much in sympathy with what Higginson wrote to her in 1869: ‘Sometimes I take out your letters & verses, dear friend, and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write & that long months pass … You only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you.’