I never came to you in white

Judith Farr

In 1847 Edward Dickinson's daughter Emily was seventeen, a student at Mary Lyon's Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Thrilled by the challenges of her education, yet repressed by the school atmosphere, she began writing letters home and to the friends she felt lonely for - passionate letters that reveled in bubbling and irreverent mischief and declared the affectionate intensity of the budding poet. Later, after her death at the age of fifty-five, friends and relatives exchanged misunderstandings of the woman they had known - and of the poetic treasure that they had no sure way of evaluating. Out of these sixty-six imagined letters, Judith Farr, herself a poet and Dickinson scholar, has created a brilliant novel, which, written in the language of Emily Dickinson's contemporaries, lays out the entire emotional spectrum of her life. We see the...