UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Edited by R. W. Franklin

Mysterious letters from Dickinson to an unknown "Master"

Written between 1858 and 1861, these three letters were addressed by Emily Dickinson to a man she called "Master." Although there is no evidence that they were ever mailed, the letters suggest an extended relationship, separated by geography, and the possibility of a much larger correspondence, as yet undiscovered.

According to R. W. Franklin, the three letters stand near the heart of Dickinson's mystery. This volume presents them in chronological order, based upon new dating of the manuscripts, and provides transcriptions that show stages in the composition of each letter. Franklin's introduction places the letters in historical perspective and closely analyzes relevant aspects of the poet's handwriting.

Included with the volume are full-sized facsimiles of the letters, which allow the reader to hold them individually in hand and read them apart from the scholarly apparatus—the closest possible approach imaginable short of examining the originals in the Amherst College Library.

"Meticulously edited. . . . [the letters] are as rich metaphorically as any of her poems . . . [and] provide a startling glimpse of Dickinson as an historical
person. . . . they highlight the arduous struggle by which [her] power was developed, hoarded, and given humane resplendence in the poems themselves."

Georgia Review

R. W. Franklin is director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and editor of the forthcoming variorum edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Literary Studies
52 pp., plus 15 pp. of facsimiles
LC 86-1093
$14.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-155-4

Distributed for the Amherst College Press

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