Editorial Introduction: Anything but the Bible

He did not wish them to read anything but the Bible. One day her brother brought home Kavanagh hid it under the piano cover & made signs to her & they read it: her father . . . was displeased.

—letter from Thomas Wentworth Higginson to his wife (L342b)

Notwithstanding the narratives that the Dickinsons liked to tell about themselves, theirs was a learned household, filled with books of poetry, history, travel narratives, and fiction. Emily read widely and promiscuously, not only Kavanagh, but a broad range of written texts. To an extent that has yet to be adequately explored, much of her own writing drew on the writing that abounded in her culture. To be sure, in her early letters she pleased her father with copious quotations from Hosea and the Psalms, but as a mature writer, she engaged many different voices. The nature of her transformation of those voices and of the kinds of information she used them to communicate, however, could be quite ambiguous. A late letter she sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson suggests not only the types of intertextual engagement she could perform, but also the complication, the obscurity, the downright bizarreness of the messages she would use the words of others to convey.

In 1879, a year after his announced engagement to his second wife had temporarily interrupted the correspondence between the Preceptor and his Scholar, Thomas Wentworth Higginson sent Emily Dickinson a copy of his Short Studies of American Authors, a collection of brief critical assessments. Her letter in acknowledgment of the gift demonstrates the richness of the field open to scholars who address questions of intertextuality in her writing: "Brabantio's Gift was not more fair than your's, though I trust without his pathetic inscription - 'Which but thou hast already, with all my Heart I would keep from thee' - " (L622). Here, Dickinson flaunts her Shakespeare, perhaps in this case turning the pages of her volume of Othello in order to get the words right. Brabantio says these words as he agrees, under duress, to allow his daughter to marry the Moor. Why would Dickinson want to associate Higginson's bestowal of his book with Brabantio's grudging magnanimity? Could she be chiding him lightly for his withdrawal from her since his second marriage, ten months previously—assuring him that she trusts he did not give the gift grudgingly, as Brabantio did? Or might she mean she hopes Higginson does not imagine that for one so well versed as herself such a gift is superfluous? As these possibilities suggest, Dickinson's quotation of even so readily familiar and available an author as Shakespeare could be used to deliver delicate or difficult messages, the brunt of which she may have only half desired her reader to receive.

Whatever her concerns, the letter to Higginson foregrounds Dickinson's long-standing habit of trying to convey complex messages (or undermine simple ones) by importing the words of others into her own discourse; she had done so since her earliest adolescent letters, using lines from the Bible, or Shakespeare, or contemporary poetry as auxiliary words. The letter goes on to include a much more deeply imbedded allusion: "Remorse for the brevity of a Book is a rare emotion, though fair as Lowell's 'Sweet Despair' in the Slipper Hymn" (L622). (Johnson comments in a note to this letter that this reference "must surely have mystified Higginson as it perhaps was intended to do" [650].) James Russell Lowell's "After the Burial," reflecting on the loss of a woman or child, closes with an image of the emptiness of a little brown shoe. It is to this extravagant image of inconsolable loss that Dickinson compares her feelings upon realizing that she has no more of Higginson's essays to read, though as with the quotation from Othello, her mystifying extravagance may hide a barbed allusion to his inaccessibility since his second marriage. Again she shows herself reading, but this time, to her brief quotation, she adds a veiled allusion to the more broadly elaborated context of loss; the imported thought enters not by some generally applicable...