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  RELATED BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MATERIALS


The Dickinson Electronic Archives Projects and their various editors share the ambitions of the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Trust--"a strong commitment to new research" and to providing "greater access to Dickinson materials." This section of the Dickinson Electronic Archives features out-of-print or otherwise hard to obtain biographical and critical resources intimately related to Emily Dickinson and the Dickinson family.

  • Winnifred Brown and Alma G. Watson, eds. Guests in Eden: Emily Dickinson, Martha Dickinson Bianchi. New York: Zeta Chapter, Phi Delta Gamma, 1946.
    Guests in Eden is an out-of-print tribute to prolific novelist and poet Martha Dickinson Bianchi, gathered by her friends after her death. In these brief accounts, one reads the reflections of a cousin, Virginia Dickinson Reynolds, whose grandfather, Emily Dickinson's uncle, had been estranged from the Amherst Dickinsons during and after the Civil War, and one can savor the account of Mary Hampson, whose husband Alfred Leete Hampson coedited numerous volumes of Emily Dickinson's writings with Bianchi. Upon Martha Dickinson Bianchi's death in 1943, the Hampsons inherited Susan and Austin Dickinson's house, Evergreens, and Mary Hampson lived there, encouraging Dickinson scholarship and more research on Bianchi's literary work, until her own death in 1988.

  • John Erskine. "The Dickinson Feud," The Memory of Certain Persons. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1947.
    John Erskine (1879-1951) was a prolific essayist, novelist, poet, critic, and editor (he helped co-edit the first Cambridge History of American Literature, published 1917). He is among the literary figures who knew Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson and Martha Dickinson Bianchi personally, as well as Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham. Featured here is a chapter from his memoir, which offers his firsthand account of meeting and getting to know Emily Dickinson's most beloved friend and her daughter, Emily's niece. Erskine offered this account as a correction to the vicious, inaccurate descriptions of Susan Dickinson and Martha Dickinson Bianchi, attacks on especially Susan's character which Erskine considered "little short of a disgrace to American biography." According to Erskine, "Susan Dickinson had a mind much above the ordinary," and both Susan and Martha were among the most generous, gracious women he ever met.

  • Thomas Wentworth Higginson. "Letter to a Young Contributor," The Atlantic Monthly IX.LIV (April 1862): 26-36; 401-411.
    This April 1862 article, read by both Dickinson households, prompted Emily Dickinson to initiate what would be a 23-year correspondence with Higginson.

  • Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editors. Poems, by Emily Dickinson.
    The Humanities Text Initiative American Verse Collection at the University of Michigan has encoded all three original series of this, the first edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry. The full text of each volume of poetry has been converted into digital form and coded in Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML) using the TEI Guidelines.
    Series 1
    Series 2
    Series 3