Jane Donahue Eberwein

Eberwein offers a fresh perspective on Emily Dickinson's use of the limiting factors in life to accomplish her quest for empowerment. She begins with Dickinson's experience of limitation, including the distortedly dimunitive self-image she projected in her writing, and her emphasis on limitation and deprivation. She examines the literary strategies Dickinson used to penetrate these boundaries--literary role models, stylistic devices that empowered her writing, and her engagement in dramatic role play to experience alternative life situations such as that of aristocrat, traveler, boy, bride, or sentimental or Gothic hero. Studying Dickinson's poems in their 19th century Christian Calvinist context, the author demonstrates how the poet intensified the limitations and losses she found in the "circuit world" of ordinary experience, in order to heighten awareness of what she called "circumference," the boundary of mortal existence. ISBN 0-87023-473-0: $25.00.

Dickinson, Strategies of Limitation

Cristanne Miller

Stephanie Farrar

Even before the first books of her poems were published in the 1890s, friends, neighbors, and even apparently strangers knew Emily Dickinson was a writer of remarkable verses. Featuring both well-known documents and material printed or collected here for the first time, this book offers a broad range of writings that convey impressions of Dickinson in her own time and for the first decades following the publication of her poems. It all begins with her school days and continues to the centennial of her birth in 1930. In addition, promotional items, reviews, and correspondence relating to early publications are included, as well as some later documents that reveal the changing assessments of Dickinson’s poetry in response to evolving critical standards. These documents provide evidence that counters many popular conceptions of her life and reception, such as the belief that the writer best known for poems focused on loss, death, and immortality was herself a morose soul. In fact, those who knew her found her humorous, playful, and interested in other people. Dickinson maintained literary and personal correspondence with major representatives of the national literary scene, developing a reputation as a remarkable writer even as she maintained extreme levels of privacy. Evidence compiled here also demonstrates that she herself made considerable provision for the survival of her poems and laid the groundwork for their eventual publication. Dickinson in Her Own Time reveals the poet as her contemporaries knew her, before her legend took hold.

A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Dickinson in Her Own Time

Represents the current state of scholarly thinking about Emily Dickinson through hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries on her life and work.

Jane Donahue Eberwein

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