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  • All Things Dickinson: An Encyclopedia of Emily Dickinson’s World ed. by Wendy Martin
  • Jane Donahue Eberwein (bio)
Martin, Wendy, ed. All Things Dickinson: An Encyclopedia of Emily Dickinson’s World (2 vols.). Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood P, 2014. $189.

Like other books in Greenwood Press’s “All Things” series of reference volumes targeted to secondary school and college libraries, this set undertakes to “examine the material culture, beliefs, customs, people, and institutions that made up their subject’s world, thus giving readers a window into the larger historical context for the topic.” Wendy Martin, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (2002), delivers generously on this promise with two volumes ranging topically from “Abolition” to “Hunting” and from “Immorality” (yes, not a typo for immortality) to “Worms.” She was assisted in this ambitious effort by two coeditors, Laura L. S. Bauer and Karen Beth Strovas, and close to a hundred contributors – most of them associated with Claremont Graduate University. Together, this team has provided an informational feast that should encourage extensive browsing among curious readers. Complementing Sharon Leiter’s Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work (Facts on File, 2007), which focuses more on poetics and biography, these encyclopedias situate Emily Dickinson in the contexts of nineteenth-century literature, United States political and social history, economics, material culture, and the scientific, geographic, and climatological circumstances that informed the poet’s understanding. Typical entries run several pages and provide a wealth of background information likely to interest knowledgeable readers as well as students just making Dickinson’s acquaintance, and the set should be especially useful to Dickinson’s admirers abroad.

With Dickinson, everything connects; so one of the joys of these books is the pleasure of using “See also” headings and index entries to follow a trail of research. A reader who begins with the familiar question of why Emily [End Page 92] Dickinson wore white might start with the “Woman in White” entry and move from there to “Fashion, Clothing, and Accessories,” and from there perhaps to “Laundry” or even “Embalming” before venturing into social-historical topics like “Bride” or “Marriage and Property Rights” or literary entries including those on Dickens, “Gothic Genre,” or Dickinson’s own “Master” letters. Some topics illumine Dickinson’s writings and life circumstances more readily than others. In general, entries focused on nature are especially rewarding—among them April Frykenberg on “Bats,” Laura L. S. Bauer on the “Indian Pipe Flower,” and Brandi Willis Schreiber on “Water.” Other topics are easily adapted to her situation, especially those on domestic practices like Lisa Marie Jones on “Food,” Megan M. Gallagher on “Lamps,” and Danielle Hinrichs on “Paper” or those on health, like Caroline Ann Morris on “Madness,” Alexander Lalama on “Medicine and Medical Practice,” and Christopher Potts on “Disease and Illness.” Entries on public affairs and finance present greater challenges, especially those that can be linked to Dickinson only through her father or Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Will anyone really seek out entries on “Banking” or “Money” or figure out why the entry on Rutherford B. Hayes runs several pages longer than the Higginson one? On the other hand, Jan Michelle Andres’s entry on “Politics” is especially well developed in terms of Emily Dickinson’s experiences and interests, as is Denise M. Groce’s on “Emancipation.” There are entries here on places and institutions (“New England,” “Amherst,” “Mount Holyoke Female Seminary”) important to the poet and on people close to her. Some of those people get compacted into two omnibus entries contributed by Katrina A. Sire on “Extended Family” (Martha Dickinson Bianchi, John Long Graves, Edward [Ned] Dickinson, Eliza Coleman, and Catherine Sweetser) and “Friends” (Henry Vaughan Emmons, Benjamin Franklin Newton, Eldridge Gridley Bowdoin, Emily Ellsworth Fowler, Mary Hardy Warner, John Sydney Adams, and Helen Fiske Hunt Jackson). Mary Schermerhorn (Samuel Bowles’s wife) rates her own entry, while the Norcross and Newman cousins get ignored despite their much greater closeness to the poet. Given the prevailing assumption within these volumes that the adult Dickinson rejected religion, there are relatively few entries that, like Frykenberg’s on “Biblical Allusions” and “Puritanism,” address such topics as their...

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