Editorial Note

As you will have noticed in the last several months, we seem to be at a moment of high popular and scholarly interest in Dickinson. This is partly because of the number of novels, biographies, and critical books on the poet that have come out over the past five years, in the United States and around the world. On the popular front, in 2010, the New York Botanical Garden featured an exhibit called "Emily Dickinson's Garden"; air time was given to Dickinson on National Public Radio and Terry Gross's "Fresh Air"; and Garrison Keillor is participating in a fundraising event for the Dickinson Museum in Amherst this December 9, the day before the poet's birthday. To mention just a few examples on the scholarly side, five books devoted to Dickinson were published in 2010, three of those five in England—including Lyndall Gordon's widely reviewed Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds (Virago). In France, the 1996 Profils Americains issue on Emily Dickinson, edited by Antoine Cazé, has just been reprinted (copies can be ordered from Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 17 rue Abbé-de-l'Épée, F-34090 Montpellier, France), and in Germany, noted translator Gunhild Kuebler is translating all of Dickinson's poems into rhymed and metered verse in German. Domhnall Mitchell and Maria Stuart's International Reception of Emily Dickinson (2009) speaks directly to the international attention Dickinson is currently receiving, as well as that she has received in the past.

This issue of the Journal contains eight reviews of books published in the past year or two, and we anticipate publishing several more reviews in our Spring 2011 issue. While the Journal is firmly in the loop of publications on Dickinson in the United States, it is not always easy for us to procure information about books appearing on Dickinson outside the States or in languages besides English. If you know about such a publication and think it should be reviewed in our pages, please send appropriate information either to me directly at ccmiller@buffalo.edu or to the Journal office at ubedj@buffalo.edu. Scholarship is always a communal enterprise, and I hope that the Emily Dickinson Journal acknowledges and helps to extend the breadth of the community of Dickinson's readers through its reviews as well as through its essays. [Begin Page vii]