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’ work. Speculation about Dickinson, her family and milieu is dependent on the work of editors followed by biographers, social historians and critics over the last hundred and twenty years. This book is indebted to Alfred Habegger’s feats of corrective research in My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, especially his work on the figures surrounding Dickinson’s childhood. This admirable biography refuses to lose the poet to biographical contexts, even while bringing these convincingly to life. A story of the feud must be dependent on meticulous research in Polly Longsworth’s edition of Austin’s and Mabel’s love letters.

I’ve returned many times to the treasures of the Houghton Library. This time the curator Leslie A. Morris extended the scope of the story by directing attention to Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s newly catalogued correspondence with her publisher, and by making available the fascinating correspondence between her predecessor William Jackson and the donor Gilbert Montague. Chapter 17 grew out of her pioneering essay on the contest over ownership of the Dickinson papers. In the Houghton reading room Susan Halpert, ably assisted by colleagues, has been expert as ever at tracking manuscripts, a model of swift helpfulness.

My cousin Jennifer Roth, of Sotheby’s, New York, asked the head of rare books and manuscripts, David Redden, to discuss the sale of the Dickinson Papers. It was generous of him to share his wealth of experience.

Thanks too to rights departments for permissions to quote, in particular to Scarlett R. Huffman of Harvard University Press for her promptness and kindness, and to archivists at the following libraries: Manuscripts and Rare Books at Yale, and Richard Warren of the Historical Sound Recordings in the Music Library at Yale; Margaret R. Dakin and Daria D’Arienzo in Amherst College Library; Tevis Kimball in Jones Library, Amherst; the Manuscript Division of the New York Public Library; Jane Wald, Director of the Dickinson Museums; Timothy Engels at Brown University Library; Nicholas Graham of the Massachusetts Historical Society; James Carder of Dumbarton Oaks; and Jack Eckert of the Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard. Living in Washington, DC during the final stages of this book, I luxuriated in the grandeur and bounty of the Library of Congress.

The chapters on the trial of 1898 could not have emerged without Karen V. Kukil, editor of Sylvia Plath’s Journals and Associate Curator of Special Collections, Smith College, who came to my rescue over an apparently lost deposition. She tracked this down with help from Nancy A. Foley, First Assistant Clerk of the Court House, Northampton Superior Court.

There were stimulating exchanges and comments from academics, writers and friends, including Mark Bostridge, Lucasta Miller, Diane Middlebrook and members of her women’s salon, Eva Hoffman, Susan Jones, Michael Gorra, Linn Cary Mehta, Carol Sanger, Faith and Stephen Williams, and Tree Swenson, Director of the Academy of American Poets. Her husband Liam Rector, founder of the writing seminars at Bennington College, created a rare place where it was possible to try out ideas. Bennington students and writers were quick to share their thoughts, particularly Alice Mattison, April Bernard, Martha Cooley, novelists Sheila Kohler and Jill McCorkle who alerted me to Tennessee Williams’s comments on Dickinson; also Susan Cheever who discussed Boston publisher Thomas Niles. Dickinson scholars Cristanne Miller and Martha Nell Smith have been enlightening and generous.

Musician Philip Clark shared his taste for musical ‘improvisation’, suggestive for Dickinson’s poetry. He also introduced me to John Adams’s settings for ‘Because I could not stop for death’ and ‘Wild Nights’ in Harmonium.

‘An ecstatic’ was the way Emily Dickinson was described by Josephine Hart, deviser of poetry readings by celebrated actors at the British Library. Her apt word stayed with me.

For expertise on epilepsy, I’m grateful to Dr Jane Mellanby in the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, and at a later stage Professor