Table of Contents

• Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. To Fill a Gap: Erasures, Disguises, Definitions
• 2. Rowing in Eden: Reading Dickinson Reading
• 3. All Men Say “What” to Me: Sexual Identity and Problems of Literary Creativity
• 4. With the Exception of Shakespeare: Reconstructing Dickinson’s Relationship with Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson
• 5. To Be Susan Is Imagination: Dickinson’s Poetry Workshop
• 6. Fame is a Fickle Food: “Sister Sue” as Producer of Poems
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

About the Author

Martha Nell Smith is a professor of English and the founding director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland.

Reviews

. . . original and provocative . . . Martha Nell Smith convincingly answers those who continue to ask why Dickinson did not publish more while she was alive. The author also offers a revisionist interpretation of the relationship between the poet and her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, whose role in both the poetic process and subsequent publication of Dickinson’s work she contends is much more significant than critics to date believe.
*Belles Lettres*