Two tendencies animate Dickinson’s letters, two ways of imagining what writing might do. On the one hand, and especially as she entered adulthood, writing could feel like a mode of retreat from the world. This way of imagining Dickinson—as an eccentric recluse—became part of her mythology even in life, and it was an image that she played no small part in promoting. In 1869, when Dickinson was thirty-eight years old, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man who (through the mail) had become her poetic mentor, asked her if they could meet: “if I could once see you & know that you are real, I might fare better.” Dickinson’s response suggested that she preferred a state of slight unreality: “A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”
Dickinson did eventually consent to see Higginson in person. After their second (and final) meeting, he wrote to his sister, “I saw my eccentric poetess Miss Emily Dickinson who never goes outside her father’s grounds & sees only me & a few others. She says, ‘there is always one thing to be grateful for—that one is one’s self & not somebody else.’ ” Never going outside your father’s grounds may be a way to insure that you do not become somebody else. Dickinson’s writing, in this way of thinking, created a simulated world that took the place of the real one. She once responded to a social invitation from Sue by writing simply, “We meet no Stranger but Ourself.” Thomas H. Johnson, the editor of the standard 1958 edition of Dickinson’s letters which this new volume supersedes, took this view to its extreme when, in his introduction, he stated, as fact: “she did not live in history and held no view of it.”
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. What that scholarship helps us to see is the countervailing tendency behind Dickinson’s epistolary practice: again and again, she set her thoughts to paper and then sent those sheets of paper out into the world, where they found the hands of someone else. Writing letters could therefore be for Dickinson not only a withdrawal from the world but also a way of extending herself into many worlds, all at once.