This compact edition, designed for use in undergraduate courses, combines a substantial selection of Dickinson’s poems (including one complete fascicle) with a selection of letters and a range of contextual materials. In a number of cases several different versions of a poem are presented side by side.

The texts are based on the handwritten manuscripts themselves, in the facsimile form in which the Emily Dickinson Archive now makes the vast majority of Dickinson’s manuscript versions available to the general public. The three major editions that are based directly on the manuscripts—those of Thomas H. Johnson (1955), R.W. Franklin (1998) and Cristanne Miller (2016)—have also been consulted; in many cases where the transcriptions of these editors differ from one another, this edition provides information in the notes as to those differences. Extensive explanatory footnotes are also provided, as is a concise but wide-ranging introduction to Dickinson and her work.

The appendices include excerpts from numerous nineteenth-century reviews of Dickinson’s first published volume (including by William Dean Howells and Andrew Lang). Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s influential Atlantic Monthly article, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” is also included in its entirety.

This volume is one of a number of editions that have been drawn from the pages of the acclaimed Broadview Anthology of American Literature. The series is designed to make selections from the anthology available in a format convenient for use in a wide variety of contexts; each edition features an introduction and exaplanatory footnotes, and is designed to meet the needs of today’s students.

This edition departs from other editions in the series in one important respect—its format. The large page size of the edition facilitates the reproduction of manuscript pages in readable facsimile form, and the two-column format of the text facilitates comparison between different versions.