"There is much here that is new and important to Dickinson studies. This is a book that needs to be published and needs to be widely read. Mitchell's work is extraordinarily thorough and careful; it is based on knowledgeable readings of Dickinson's poems and letters as well as on unusual depth in cultural and historical study. . . . Mitchell's witty skepticism aimed at Dickinson, at nineteenth-century pieties, and at the pieties of late twentieth-century Dickinson studies provides a refreshing tone for the field."—Cristanne Miller, coeditor of The Emily Dickinson Handbook