Open Me Carefully

Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, Ellen Louise Hart, Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart, Martha Nell Smith

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780963818362
• eBook ISBN: 9780819500335
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The 19th–century American poet's uncensored and breathtaking letters, poems, and letter-poems to her sister-in-law and childhood friend.

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. 

Praise for  Open Me Carefully

"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

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Publisher’s Note
• Introduction
• A Note on the Text
• Chronology
• Section One: Why Susie!: Early Writings, 1850 to mid-1850s
• Section Two: Sue, Dear Sue, Sweet Sue, Sister: Early Middle Writings, mid-1850s to mid-1860s
• Section Three: The Incidents of Love: Late Middle Writings, mid-1860s to mid-1870s
• Section Four: To Be Susan Is Imagination: Late Writings, mid-1870s to May 1886
• Coda
• Key to Materials
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index of First Lines
• Index of Names and Subjects