“Scandal and pathos abound” (The New Yorker) in this riveting account of the mother and daughter who brought Emily Dickinson’s genius to light. Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography • Finalist for the Plutarch Award Despite Emily Dickinson’s renown, the story of the two women most responsible for her initial posthumous publication—Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham—has remained in the shadows of the archives. Utilizing hundreds of overlooked letters and diaries to weave together three unstoppable women, Julie Dobrow reveals the intrigue of Dickinson’s literary beginnings, including Mabel’s tumultuous affair with Emily’s brother, Austin Dickinson, controversial editorial decisions, and a battle over the right to define the so-called Belle of Amherst.

Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography, Alfred Habegger presents the first thorough account of Dickinson’s growth–a richly contextualized story of genius in the process of formation and then in the act of overwhelming production. Building on the work of former and contemporary scholars, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books brings to light a wide range of new material from legal archives, congregational records, contemporary women's writing, and previously unpublished fragments of Dickinson’s own letters. Habegger discovers the best available answers to the pressing questions about the poet: Was she lesbian? Who was the person she evidently loved? Why did she refuse to publish and why was this refusal so integral an aspect of her work? Habegger also illuminates many of the essential connection sin Dickinson’s story: between the decay of doctrinal Protestantism and the emergence of her riddling lyric vision; between her father’s political isolation after the Whig Party’s collapse and her private poetic vocation; between her frustrated quest for human intimacy and the tuning of her uniquely seductive voice. The definitive treatment of Dickinson’s life and times, and of her poetic development, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books shows how she could be both a woman of her era and a timeless creator. Although many aspects of her life and work will always elude scrutiny, her living, changing profile at least comes into focus in this meticulous and magisterial biography.

In Feeling as a Foreign Language, Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. Fulton contemplates topics ranging from the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome to fractals from the aesthetics of complexity theory to the need for "cultural incorrectness." Along the way, she falls in love with an outrageous 17th century poet, argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters, and calls for a courageous poetics of inconvenient knowledge.

A true tale of illicit love in the era of Emily Dickinson. The author adds her own annotations to correspondence, journals, diaries and the observations of the protagonists' peers, to paint a detailed picture of social and sexual mores in 19th-century America.

Traces the lives of three American women, Puritan, Victorian, and modern, and compares the themes and philosophy of their poetry

“Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.” In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it. "Black Is the Body is one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read. It's about race, it's about womanhood, it's about friendship, it's about a life of the mind, and also a life of the body. But more than anything, it's about love. I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages." --Elizabeth Gilbert WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROSE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND KIRKUS REVIEWS ONE OF MAUREEN CORRIGAN'S 10 UNPUTDOWNABLE READS OF THE YEAR