#master letters

Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell have edited a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s letter.  The New Yorker published an article about their book this week, here:

 “A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,” wrote Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1869 – and in her lifetime she wrote hundreds of letters.

However, following Dickinson’s death, her sister Lavinia destroyed much of Emily’s correspondences as per “Emily’s direction.”

In 1930, Mabel Loomis Todd, co-editor of the first posthumous edition of Dickinson’s poems, wrote this in an article about "Emily Dickinson’s Literary Debut" for Harper’s Monthly Magazine:

“Soon after her death her sister Lavinia came to me, as usual in late evening, actually trembling with excitement. She told me she had discovered a veritable treasure – quantities of Emily’s poems which she had had no instructions to destroy. She had already burned without examination hundreds of manuscripts, and letters to Emily, many of them from nationally known persons, thus, she believed, carrying out her sister’s partly expressed wishes, but without intelligent discrimination. Later she bitterly regretted such inordinate haste. But these poems, she told me, must be printed at once.”

In 1958, Thomas H. Johnson published an edition of Dickinson’s letters where, in his introduction, he stated that – due to the poet’s reclusiveness – Dickinson “did not live in history and held no view of it.”

Fast forward to the New Yorker’s article.  Its writer Kamran Javadizadeh points out that “Writing letters could…be for Dickinson not only a withdrawal from the world but also a way of extending herself into many worlds, all at once.”

In addition, “The nearly seven decades of scholarship that have followed Johnson’s pronouncement of Dickinson’s reclusiveness—scholarship to which Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, the new volume’s editors, have contributed and from which they adroitly draw—have revealed it to be a crude caricature, one that says as much about men’s fantasies about women (and about poetry readers’ fantasies about poets) as it does about the actual person who wrote those thousand-odd letters.” 

One topic not covered in the article is Dickinson’s “Master Letters,” a set of three emotionally laden notes addressed to a figure whom Dickinson calls “Master,” but never names.

Are the Master letters included in the updated edition “The Letters of Emily Dickinson”?

Yes.  

Here’s info from an appendix of the book:

“Dickinson referred to various people in letters and poems as ‘Master,’ including *Leonard Humphrey; *Thomas Wentworth Higginson (multiple times); and (once humorously) Austin.  She also uses ‘Master’ to refer to God or Christ.  Whether ED was writing a person, a fictitious character, or experimenting with language of desire and devotion in these drafts remains in debate.”