Category: Letters

Do The Right Thing

9/12/2026

In a nutshell: I pulled from the stacks at UVA’s Shannon Library a first edition 1894 copy of Letters of Emily Dickinson, published by Roberts Brothers of Boston, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, and signed by the poet’s sister Lavinia. The deets are HERE.

The book had been purchased as a Christmas gift in 1894 for someone named Ethel C. Ague (though I’m not sure about the spelling of that last name – it looks like “Ague”), and the inscription reads, “Ethel may add the friendship of Emily’s sister” – and it is signed, “Lavinia” – and there I was in the stacks, holding this unique, valuable li’l gem.

I ended yesterday's post, “It Happened One Day,” with these questions:

“What would you do were you in a comparable circumstance? What do you think I did?”

By the way, before I reveal "the rest of the story," let me say that this morning I found a edition of this very same book -- one also inscribed by Lavinia Dickinson -- on sale at The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America. The inscription in this particular volume reads, "For Benjamin Kimball with the gratitude of Emily's sister" and it is signed, "Lavinia." It is listed on the site for 12,500.00.

So what did I do?

I remember looking at the book’s inscription and then down at the open space where the book had been, and then at the inscription again, and then back at the shelf's open space. . .

I remember wondering if I should just return the book to the shelf and be on my way – but nah – I couldn’t do that. What if that book later – for a number of possible reasons – disappeared?

I wondered, “Is this book really available for check out?” I mean, seriously – could I go to the circulation desk, check it out, and take it home? Evidently I could – as could anyone else – but what then? What if the book were lost? Damaged? Destroyed? So no – I did not consider checking it out.

However, I did take the book to the main circulation desk, and I explained to the two clerks on duty what I held in my hand. They listened in amazement. I asked “if” I (or anyone) attempted to borrow the book, would the computer in any way provide an alert about the special nature of this particular volume?

“Let’s try it,” said one of the clerks, and she checked it out to me. Nope – no flag of any kind.

She then called the manager-on-duty over, and I explained again: the history of publication of Dickinson’s poetry, Mabel Loomis Todd, this volume of letters – and in this case, the inscription from “Emily’s sister” along with her signature.

With each detail, he mouth gaped open wider and wider.

I advised that she discuss the book with the Special Collections Library. I could not imagine just returning it to the shelves for general circulation.

And then I departed (without the book; the manager had it in her hands).

What next? I think I'll venture over there next week to make sure that the book isn't just back on the shelves in the PS 1541 section. If it is, I'll check it out -- and then walk it over to Special Collections myself. ;-)

By the way, I also found the two-volume set on Ebay for sale for 6,500.00. However, these volumes show a bit more wear-and-tear, and neiither is signed.

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It Happened One Day

9/11/2026

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It happened one day. As a matter f fact, it happened yesterday. Something truly unbelievable happened to me and my girl Lavinia Dickinson yesterday. It was totally unexpected, utterly incredible, and completely remarkable.

And did I say, it was truly unbelievable?

I was on the grounds of the University of Virginia. I had stopped by the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library to discuss a future appointment, and afterwards, I strolled over to the Edgar Shannon Library (formerly Alderman Library) to check the stacks with call number PS 1541 – the alpha-numeric designation the Library of Congress Classification system has assigned specifically for Emily Dickinson.

The collection of Dickinson books on the shelves was quite extensive – about 10 of the shelves in the three pics below. I had about twenty or so minutes to spend, so I scanned the titles and pulled out a random few books from the shelves to snap a few pics.

Below: The Shannon Library's Ps 1541 section -- from the red arrow on the far left to the red arrow on the far right.

I started top right, then the shelves in the middle from top to bottom, and then those down there on the far left. For those bottom dwellers, I looked for small stool nearby if one were available – I wasn’t sure if my knees could make the required flexation required to get down there (and yes, I made up the word “flexation” – a combination of “flex” and “contraction”). No such luck with any sort of stool, ottoman, or pouf – so I crumpled to the floor as best I could to scan the last few titles.

Then, just as I was about to hoist myself from the floor, I decided to grab that one last unidentified book on the bottom shelf. There was no title on the spine. What was that book?

I brought forth the diminutive volume, and just as I caught sight of the cover – which matched that of Mabel Loomis Todd’s first series of Poems published in the 1890s – I thought to myself, “What have we here?”

Below left: The book from the shelf. Below right: The 1890, 1891, and 1896 publications of Dickinson's Poems.

I opened the front cover – and I almost fell on the floor. Well, I was already on the floor – so perhaps I should say I got the vapors, fell into a fit of insensibility, and momentarily lost my cognizational awareness (“cognizational” is a term I coined in a recent post, HERE).

There I was – crumpled on the floor in the stacks of the Shannon Library holding an 1894 edition of Letters of Emily Dickinson, published by Roberts Brothers and edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, and once I regained a modicum of sense and sensibility, I beheld once more the book’s initial page – AND IT WAS SIGNED BY EMILY’S SISTER, LAVINIA DICKINSON!

Evidently, the book had been purchased as a Christmas gift in 1894 for someone named Ethel C. Ague (though I’m not sure about the spelling of that last name – it looks like “Ague”), and the inscription reads, “Ethel may add the friendship of Emily’s sister” – and it is signed, “Lavinia.” I suspect Ethel’s husband bought for her?

What would you do were you in a comparable circumstance? What do you think I did?

This, dear reader, is what is known in the business as a Dickinson Cliffhanger! ; )

Below: The book was a gift to the library from Col. L. J. Owen in October of 1951 (or 57?).

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The Scattered Letter

9/8/2026

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Perhaps the most important letter in all of American literature is Emily Dickinson’s dispatch to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in April1862 to ask, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself-it cannot see, distinctly-and I have none to ask-”

Higginson had published an article in The Atlantic entitled “Letter to a Young Contributor” in which he offered advice to aspiring writers. Higginson advised, “Be noble both in the affluence and the economy of your diction; spare no wealth that you can put in, and tolerate no superfluity that can be struck out.”

Dickinson read the article, responded with her query, enclosed four poems, and added, “I enclose my name—asking you, if you please—Sir—to tell me what is true?”

Flash forward to September 2026. I was deep into the 800 non-fiction shelves at my local library in my quest to discover what Dickinson books they had on hand when, in the 808 section, “Rhetoric and Collections of Literature,” I spied the volume Great World Letters.

“Shirley it must be in there,” I explained to my invisible companion, Shirley.

I pulled the book from the shelf, flipped to the back pages, and scanned the index for what I knew must be there – and BINGO! Pages 365 – 367, Emily Dickinson!

I turned to the pages and… WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?

The letter was NOT there. There was a bizarre article about Dickinson with an odd take on her correspondence with Higginson, stating “she began her correspondence with Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson through a ‘stray note of admiration’ she sent him for an article in The Atlantic Monthly.”

Then, completely out of left field in the third paragraph comes this: “Various scholars have guessed at the identity of the one great romance in Emily’s life.” What the hell???

On the next page, a “letter” from August 1870 from the poet to Higginson is included, but it is not THE letter, the most important letter in American literary history. As a matter of fact, it is not even a letter Dickinson wrote to Higginson. Here’s the story:

Dickinson did, indeed, write to Higginson in August 1870, and she said this:

16 August 1870

Dear friend

I will be at Home and glad.

I think you said the 15th. The incredible never surprises us because it is the incredible.

E. Dickinson

She mentions “the 15th” because Higginson to visit Dickinson at her home on August 15, 1870, and following his visit, he wrote to his wife and provided details and quotes from his time with Dickinson.

Higginson opens his letter with this:

“I shan't sit up tonight to write you all about E.D. dearest but if you had read Mrs. Stoddard’s novels you could understand a house where each member runs his or her own selves. Yet I only saw her."

He later quoted Dickinson as saying, "Truth is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it” – the opening line to the “letter” printed in Great World Letters. Additionally, all of the other lines in that same “letter” depicted on page 366 were quotes Higginson wrote to his wife in reporting what Dickinson had said to him.

Oddly enough, the book got Dickinson’s age wrong, too, on the next page when they said, “she lived to the age of fifty-six.” Dickinson died when she was fifty-five.

As you can well imagine, I was completely floored by this volume’s deficient if not laughable reporting on the most famous and important letter in all of American literature. Then, to top it off, I turned to the front of the book and found quotes “In Praise of Letters.”

Again, the editors missed the mark, for there is quite a well-known quote from Dickinson about letters that should have been included. In a letter from June 1869, Dickinson opened a letter to Higginson with this:

“A letter always feels to me like Immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”

And what did the editors of Great World Letters chose to include instead? Well, for one, “The earth has nothing like a she epistle.” Seriously?

I mean – seriously?

Now, if you’ve been following along these past few days as I’ve been chronicling my glorious, curious, so strange, very odd day, then you might recall that in my first entry last Friday, “The Lady Appeared,” HERE, the very last thing I said was “stash this quote away in a mental filing cabinet as I'll mention it again soon in another episode of my weirdly odd, oddly strange, and strangely weird day.” And what quote was that? Why, it was this very quote by Dickinson about letters, as it was used by Thomas Johnson as the title for Section VII in Volume 2 of Emily Dickinson’s Letters, his three-volume set offered for three hundred twenty-five dollars at the bookstore with the oh-so-pleasant store clerks. Wink, wink.

Plus, if you check back to yesterday’s installment, “Two Scenes from ‘James and the Very Odd Day,’” HERE, I reported this, “As I thumbed through the book (Poetry Will Save Your Life) – an unexpected twist! THERE on page 81 was the letter, the letter from Dickinson to Higginson, the very letter that was absent earlier in the day when. . . . Well, I'll get to that part of the tale tomorrow.”

Well, here we are “tomorrow,” and yes – a book about poets and their poems that I found in a used book story DID include the most famous letter in all of American literature – but a book entitled Great World Letters DID NOT. What else could I do but laugh?

Tomorrow: The BIGGEST SHOCK of my glorious, curious, so strange very odd day!

BY THE WAY . . .

I looked into that quote by Byron, “The earth has nothing like a she epistle," and once again, I got bogus information from Google's AI overview. I'd say it's wrong a good 80% of the time -- or more. Does anyone else find that to be true?

I plugged the quote into the search field and this is what came up:

Wallace Stevens? But I thought the quote was from Byron? Well, it is from Byron, from Canto 13, Stanza 105 of Don Juan:

And the Wallace Stevens poem, "The Death of a Soldier" -- does it include a line similar to "the earth has nothing like a she epistle"? Not at all.

So then where'd the poem come from in the AI Overview? I plugged the first three lines into the Google search field and got this:

Google's AI asked me "Are those lines your own original poetry" -- the very lines it gave to me earlier as a poem by Wallace Stevens with a quote straight out of Byron. I can't make this stuff up, folks!

Hee hee...I plugged Byron's quote into Google one more time and got this:

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The Lady Appeared

9/4/2026

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Yesterday was both weirdly odd, oddly strange, and strangely weird – so how bizarre is that? I traveled to the center of the city in the mid of the morning to visit a library and three used bookstores, and I swear, I lived through what seemed to be a mix of the "Twilight Files" and the "X Zone." I'll begin in the second bookstore with episode three, “The Lady Appeared.”

I had just consumed a delicious cup of corn and crab soup at a local bistro, and I sent back my compliments to the chef (although I did not include any accolade for the small puck –like biscuit of which I will never speak again).

I departed, and into my purview a seller of used books, antique maps, and old prints came into view. I entered the shop, and to my right were shelves upon shelves of antique volumes.

“Ohhh,” I said excitedly to the shopkeep who was shuffling stacks of charts and maps on a table before me, “I publish daily posts about Emily Dickinson and wonder if you have any books on or by her?”

“No,” she snapped without looking up. Then she turned to a co-worker who was hunched over a computer on a dimly lit desk. “Do we have any Dickinson,” she asked.

“No,” he huffed, without looking up.

She turned back to me and repeated sharply, “No.”

She hoisted her heap of newly arranged placards, cast them to the table with a whack to level the stack, and marched off to drop them in a bin just outside the store. When she shuffled out of sight, I scanned the wall of time-worn books before me. ’Twas then the lady appeared – the Belle of Amherst, the myth, the poetess in perpetuity. She was staring right at me.

I asked if I could thumb through the volumes, a three-book set of The Letters of Emily Dickinson edited by Thomas H. Johson and Theodora Ward and published in 1958.

Atop the box was a small sticker – a bit smaller than a fingernail – and on it, a number and a word. I don’t recall the word – maybe “box”? – but the number was 325.

I asked, “Is this just an inventory number of sorts, three-two-five, or the price, three hundred and twenty-five dollars?”

Without looking up, he at the dimly lit desk growled, “Three hundred twenty-five dollars.”

“Ohhh,” I replied. “That’s a bit out of my league” – and I laughed. No humor was exchanged.

I looked through the volumes. A few quotes caught my eye so I snapped a few pictures (which I’ll share momentarily down below).

After the fifth pic click “zzzht” of my phone, he-at-the-desk rose, turned toward me, and said to his co-worker something like, “I’m hearing a lot of picture taking and want to make sure that he’s just trying not to buy a three hundred twenty-five dollar book.”

I spaketh not but thought to myself, “Are you kidding me? You think I’m taking pictures of a three-volume set with over 1,000 pages just to save three hundred and twenty –five dollars?” Instead, I smiled and said something like, “Oh – I’ll stop taking pictures if you like. I’m just snapping a few quotes that jumped out at me. I publish daily posts –”

He cut me off.

“Yes,” he said flatly. “You told us.”

I closed the books and returned them to their cardboard casing. She-of-the-shuffled-placards accepted it from me and returned the set to its place on the shelf – this time hiding the poet’s gaze from view.

And with that, the lady vanished.

To refashion a poem by Dickinson:

Image of Light, Adieu –
Thanks for the interview –
So long – so short –
Purveyor of the Books –
Coeval Logophile –
Impart – Depart –

Below: The five pics I took of the five quotes that jumped out at me:

"Prose Fragments": Johnson, who published the first "complete" volume of Dickinson's poetry, did not include any of these fragments as either complete or partial poems; however, some researchers have argued that some of the lines "occasionally demonstrate a degree of metrical regularity"; therefore, some of the lines show up in subsequent volumes as "poetry." One example is shown below.

I love that first fragment, "As one noble Act makes a whole neighborhood tender with the new or forgotten Grace possible to each " – I'd not heard this before.

Kind of reminded me of the simple adage so popular these days, "Be Kind."

As noted above, some "prose fragments" are viewed as poetry in later editions of Dickinson's work. Take a look at fragment #75 at the left; it shows up as poem #1244 (below) in R. W. Franklin's volume of The Poems of Emily Dickinson:

Remember – the second pass you by –
The Second is pursuing the Century
The Century is chasing Eternity –
What a Responsibility –
No wonder that the little Second flee –
Out of it’s frightened way –

Prose fragment #80 has always amused me: Dickinson wrote, "I don’t keep the Moth part of the House – I keep the Butterfly part."

I reminds me of a quote from Frank Lloyd Wright -- though with a different slant: "Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves"

Of course, that always makes me think of this quote from E. E. Cummings: "I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart."

But hey -- it's worth it, no? For the luxuries and "Butterfly part" of life?

I actually saw Dickinson's poetry fragment #93 (pictured at the right), “Not to send errands by John Alden is one of the instructions of History.” in a display at the Frost Library at Amherst College on a recent trip to Amherst, MA.

I wrote about it HERE.

Section VIII of Volume 2 is entitled, “A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”

Sooo...it's not included in the section of "Prose Fragments"; however, stash this quote away in a mental filing cabinet as I'll mention it again soon in another episode of my weirdly odd, oddly strange, and strangely weird day.

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Letters To The Editor

7/17/2025

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In my post on July 14th, I shared a portion from a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in the spring of 1886 where Emily Dickinson stated, “I have been very ill, Dear friend, since November, bereft of Book and Thought, by the Doctor's reproof, but begin to roam in my Room now - ”

Dickinson died that spring, on May 15, 1886, at the age of 55. However, before her death, she dispatched two more letters to Higginson – one in late April 1886 and one in early May 1886.

At some point before, Higginson had written to Dickinson to inform her of the death of their mutual friend, Helen Hunt Jackson. Higginson must have stated that his tribute to her, a sonnet entitled “To the Memory of H. H.,” had been printed in the May issue of Century Magazine – and the letter from Dickinson to Higginson I had previously mentioned suggests that she had received from him a transcript of his sonnet in advance of publication.

Dickinson’s penultimate letter to Higginson (April 1886) stated, “The beautiful Sonnet confirms me-Thank you for confiding it,” and then she shared a short poem:

The immortality she gave
We borrowed at her Grave-
For just one Plaudit famishing,
The Might of Human Love-

Her final letter to Higginson in May 1886, just days before her own death, included just two lines:

Deity-does He live now?
My friend-does he breathe?

Evidently, on April 30, 1886, the Boston correspondent for the Springfield Republican reported that Higginson was to have read at a Browning Society meeting but was prevented by illness from doing so. That report evidently elicited that final message.

Here are links to the letters: The first letter mentioned from the spring of 1886 is HERE. Dickinson's penultimate letter to Higginson from April 1886 is HERE. Her final letter to Higginson is HERE.

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These Are Her Letters to the World

3/18/2025

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Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell have edited a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s letter. The New Yorker published an article about their book this week, HERE.

“A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,” wrote Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1869 – and in her lifetime she wrote hundreds of letters.

However, following Dickinson’s death, her sister Lavinia destroyed much of Emily’s correspondences as per “Emily’s direction.”

In 1930, Mabel Loomis Todd, co-editor of the first posthumous edition of Dickinson’s poems, wrote this in an article about “Emily Dickinson’s Literary Debut” for Harper’s Monthly Magazine:

“Soon after her death her sister Lavinia came to me, as usual in late evening, actually trembling with excitement. She told me she had discovered a veritable treasure – quantities of Emily’s poems which she had had no instructions to destroy. She had already burned without examination hundreds of manuscripts, and letters to Emily, many of them from nationally known persons, thus, she believed, carrying out her sister’s partly expressed wishes, but without intelligent discrimination. Later she bitterly regretted such inordinate haste. But these poems, she told me, must be printed at once.”

In 1958, Thomas H. Johnson published an edition of Dickinson’s letters where, in his introduction, he stated that – due to the poet’s reclusiveness – Dickinson “did not live in history and held no view of it.”

Fast forward to the New Yorker’s article. Its writer Kamran Javadizadeh points out that “Writing letters could…be for Dickinson not only a withdrawal from the world but also a way of extending herself into many worlds, all at once.”

In addition, “The nearly seven decades of scholarship that have followed Johnson’s pronouncement of Dickinson’s reclusiveness—scholarship to which Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, the new volume’s editors, have contributed and from which they adroitly draw—have revealed it to be a crude caricature, one that says as much about men’s fantasies about women (and about poetry readers’ fantasies about poets) as it does about the actual person who wrote those thousand-odd letters.”

One topic not covered in the article is Dickinson’s “Master Letters,” a set of three emotionally laden notes addressed to a figure whom Dickinson calls “Master,” but never names.

Are the Master letters included in the updated edition “The Letters of Emily Dickinson”?

Yes.

Here’s info from an appendix of the book:

“Dickinson referred to various people in letters and poems as ‘Master,’ including *Leonard Humphrey; *Thomas Wentworth Higginson (multiple times); and (once humorously) Austin. She also uses ‘Master’ to refer to God or Christ. Whether ED was writing a person, a fictitious character, or experimenting with language of desire and devotion in these drafts remains in debate.”

The letters are numbered 192 (on page 268), 282 (on page 324), and 299 (on page 332).

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These Are My Letters To The World

3/10/2024

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If/when looking for a Dickinson poem, here’s a list on Wikisource which uses Johnson’s listings from his 1955 edition of “Complete Poems,” click HERE.

If you’re looking for a particular word used in a poem, you can use the online Dickinson archive, click HERE.

If you’re interested in reading some of Dickinson’s correspondences, check out this link, click HERE.

AND – if interested in her letters – I’ve got some news for you: Coming this April, Harvard University Press is publishing a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s correspondence — expanded and revised for the first time in over sixty years. The Letters of Emily Dickinson presents all 1,304 of her extant letters, along with the small number available from her correspondents.

PLUS – to celebrate this publication, the HUP will host a program – in-person and online – at Amherst College’s Frost Library on Wednesday, April 3. Information about the program and a link to register can be found HERE.

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Do The Right Thing

It Happened One Day

The Scattered Letter

The Lady Appeared

Letters To The Editor

These Are Her Letters to the World

These Are My Letters To The World

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