Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson - Paperback

by Emily Dickinson (Author), Ellen Louise Hart (Editor), Martha Nell Smith (Editor)

Emily Dickinson's uncensored and breathtaking letters, poems, and letter-poems to her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson

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 REVIE

Author Biography

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 the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Martha Nell Smith is the author of Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson, and co-author of The Comic Power in Emily Dickinson. She is professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park and is coordinator of the Dickinson Electronic Archives Project.