There's A Certain Slant Of Light

Original Manuscript of “There’s a certain Slant of light” by Emily Dickinson

Harvard University’s The Emily Dickinson Archive has been collecting scans of the original manuscripts of Dickinson’s work for those interested in studying her work. These documents are particularly important in understanding how Dickinson used punctuation and how editors have revised her work through time.

Letters to Susan Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

An ongoing project by The Dickinson Electronic Archives to re-edit and publish Dickinson’s letters, the most complete section focuses on the letters between Dickinson and her friend, sister-in-law, and potential lover, Susan.

Dickinson in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates edited by Jane Donahue Eberwein, Stephanie Farrar, and Christanne Miller (2015)

This collection of documents from her school days to the centennial of her birth in 1930 offer a wide range of impressions of Dickinson. It also includes promotional items, reviews, and documents that reveal the evolving understanding and assessments of Dickinson’s work. This collection has the purpose of showing the poet as her contemporaries knew her before the mythology of Dickinson became overwhelming and cemented in public consciousness.

“From Local Color to Modernist Poet: Revisiting Emily Dickinson’s Critics in the 1890s” by Patricia Chaudron (2016)

Instead of placing criticism of Dickinson’s poetry in the 1890s in conflict with her proto-Modernist style, Chaudron instead argues that the emerging Realism movement lead critics to think of her style as outdated. She argues that only when Dickinson was de-regionalized in the early 20th century could her work be appreciated as anticipating Modernism.

Religion around Emily Dickinson by W. Clark Gilpin (2014)

Gilpin considers how the 19th century understanding of religion often escapes a modern reader’s attention when examining the religious themes and images in Dickinson’s poetry. He argues that religious beliefs were also expressed in all aspects of social life and organization. In this way, Dickinson connects religion to her own personal perspective, illustrating what it means to be religious for a woman of her time.