Wayne D. Ford, Ph.D., author of "The Firefighter's Guide to Managing Stress" docwifford@msn.com

For anyone who is seriously interested in Emily Dickinson, this is a marvelous book that provides up-to-date information about her life and works, her letters and manuscripts, the cultural climate of her age, her reception and influence, and what is going on in current Dickinson scholarship.

The book's 22 essays have been distributed in eight sections : Introduction; Biography; Historical Context; The Manuscripts; The Letters; Dickinson's Poetics; Reception and Influence; New Directions in Dickinson Scholarship.

Although I've read many critical collections, several of which were devoted exclusively to Dickinson, I can't remember ever having been so impressed. Usually an anthology will hold one or two outstanding contributions, with the rest being humdrum and of little real interest, but here pretty well all of them are outstanding, and I found only one that struck me as being both pretentious and obscure.

I was especially impressed by Robert Weisbuch's brilliant 'Prisming Dickinson, or Gathering Paradise by Letting Go,' by Josef Raab's 'The Metapoetic Element in Dickinson,' by Martha Nell Smith's 'Dickinson's Manuscripts,' by Paul Crumbley's 'Dickinson's Dialogic Voice,' by Roland Hagenbuchle's 'Dickinson and Literary Theory,' and in fact by many others. So much so that this seems to me the single most valuable book on Dickinson that I've ever seen, and the one from which I've learned most and continue to learn. It really is that good.

The book is bound in a full strong cloth, stitched, beautifully printed on excellent strong smooth ivory-tinted paper, has clearly been designed to withstand the heavy use it will be getting, and is excellent value for money. No serious student of Emily Dickinson should be without it. Weisbuch's essay, serving as it does to provide one with a whole new way of understanding ED, is pretty well worth the price of the book itself.

So don't pass this one up! It's a gem!

Emily Dickinson was a great letter writer, in all senses of the word. In fact one gets the impression that she actually preferred writing to people, than meeting and conversing with them, and for her the arrival of a letter was a great event. A letter was something she looked forward to with keen anticipation, and which she savored to the full whenever one arrived.

The present selection of letters represents only a small proportion of the letters Emily Dickinson actually wrote. She was an inveterate letter-writer, had many correspondents, and wrote thousands of letters. And people in those days collected letters just as today.

Unfortunately it was the custom, whenever anyone died, to make a bonfire of all of their correspondence, probably because of its personal and confidential nature. In this way thousands of pages of Emily Dickinson's writings have been lost to posterity, and we would know much more aboute the details of her day-to-day life, and be able to date her poems more accurately, if it hadn't been for this tragic loss.

Just how great the loss is may be gaged by taking a look at the way Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith have treated her letters in 'Open Me Carefully : Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson' (1998). Whereas Thomas Johnson prints all of ED's letters as straight prose, which of course leads us to read them as straight prose, Hart-Smith give us their particular letters as they actually appear in the original draft - not as continous lines of prose but as very short lines with numerous line breaks - in other words, as poetry.

It would seem that at least some of ED's 'letters' are not so much letters as 'letter-poems,' and when read as poems produce a remarkable range of effects that are lost when all line breaks are removed and the 'letter' is regularized as straight prose. The loss of her letters now begins to look much more serious, for there seems to be a growing feeling among readers that her letters were every bit as great an artistic achievement as her poems.

Given this, the present book becomes something that should interest all serious students of ED, although before reading it they might (if they haven't already) take at look at the Hart-Smith, and keep it in mind while reading the Johnson. One wonders how much poetry may be lurking unrecognized in the regularized lines of 'Emily Dickinson's Selected Letters.'

If you are, like me, an Emily Dickinson's great admirer you will be genuinely drawn into this book. Emily Dickinson has bewitched and perplexed everyone with her extremely profound poetry disguised in apparent simplicity. However, in her book of letters we uncover the woman (and not the author) behind her work, whose main assets were acute sensitivity and lovingness. This collection, unlike other books of the genre, such as Elizabeth Bishop's One Art or Keats's book of letters, do not reveal much of her poetry, as her mental struggle with the work, her intentions, or choice of words. Even so, the reader is allowed into her family relationships, into her care and love for her few friends, and above all into her deep-set feeling of solitude. Besides, throughout her letters she discloses her main existential concerns, which are inevitably reflected in her poems. This book makes it possible to discover the books she read and the ones that offered her the greatest pleasure. As the collection includes from her juvenile writings to her latest letters when already living in social "exile," they form a most engrossing reading, with the characteristics of an autobiography, without the intention by the author to write one. In her very words, "my letter as a bee, goes laden."

Author David Dickinson offers a delightful combination of engaging characters (the romance between Powerscourt and Lady Lucy is very well done as is the time-table toting butler) and compelling mystery. As Powerscourt digs deeper into the murder, he finds that Prince Eddy had much to account for and that the list of people with motives is long indeed. Powerscourt's investigative abilities and the reader's enjoyment are enhanced by his insights into society and humanity.

The scandals of the Royals have made history from the days of Shakespear until today. Dickinson reminds us that even in the glory days of the British Empire and Victoria, power and corruption add up to a dangerous combination--dangerous both to the royals themselves, and to everyone who comes in contact with them. GOODNIGHT SWEET PRINCE is a joy to read.

Highly Recommended.

It's 1892 (and the 54th year of Queen Victoria's reign) when Prince Eddy is discovered murdered in his bed (he has been stabbed over and over again and died with a smile on his face) at Sandringham (the royal country house). His father, the Prince of Wales, immediately orders a cover-up, and the story is put out that the Prince had died of influenza instead. But the Prince of Wales also insists that his son's death be investigated and avenged. Lord Francis Powerscourt, a special investigator who had been initially called on to discover who was trying to blackmail the Prince of Wales, is now asked to investigate the murder instead. How was so audacious a crime carried out? Why didn't the Prince call out for help? And who wanted him dead? These are the questions that Lord Francis has to ask himself as he begins his investigation. The suspects are many and diverse, and include anyone from the anarchists to the Prince of Wales himself, who was furious at Prince Eddy for his scandalous and dissolute behaviour. And as Lord Francis follows the wispy path of gossip and innuendo, he begins to uncover such a trail of scandal and vice that even makes this very decent man begin to question what he is doing.

The great thing about this novel is the manner in which the plot unfolds. Davidson takes his time to set the stage -- the murder of the prince does not take place until a quarter way into the book -- but by that time he has drawn a picture of the two dissolute and arrogant princes, intent on their own pleasure, and with very little care for the feelings of others, as well as given a very good idea of the kind of person the chief investigator, Lord Francis Powerscourt, is. We see how early tragedy has touched Lord Francis's life, and how this has made him especially sensitive to the pain and sorrow in others. The pacing of this novel is flawless, and the manner in which Davidson 'fleshes' out his characters in absolutely brilliant -- with a few well chosen words and phrases, you'd swear that the very characters themselves have come alive in front of you. "Goodnight, Sweet Prince" is an extremely well written book, that however may not be everyone cup of tea since it deals with the scandalous and imperious behavior of royal family members that may offend some readers, esp if their royalists. But it would be a shame however to give this excellent book a miss, because it is an extremely fun read.

"A Hedge Away" brings alive the people and institutions of one small, but vibrant New England community in a way that challenges our preconceptions about what Victorian American small towns were like.

Refreshingly free of heavy-handed political interpretation, Lombardo's text gives us enough detail to draw our own conclusions.

Though I live only a few miles away from the small town that is the subject of this book, until I read it, I had no idea of the richness of the characters who populated its streets a hundred years ago, or of the many tragedies and scandals they endured.

This book is a "must read" for anyone interested in 19th century New England!

What do we mean when we speak of "an Emily Dickinson poem" ? If you think about it, we could mean one of at least five different things. We may be referring :

(1) to her poems as they are found in her original manuscripts;

(2) to their photographic facsimiles as in the present edition;

(3) to the Variorum editions of Thomas H. Johnson or R. W. Franklin which attempt to get over into typographic form as much as they can of her highly idiosyncratic manuscript drafts - with all of their variants and their peculiarities of line breaks, spacing, punctuation, and of alternate words about which she never made up her mind but placed neatly alongside or beneath many of her poems;

(4) to the reader's editions of Johnson and Franklin which offer what these Dickinson scholars and expert editors feel is _one_ (of many possible) sensible and acceptable readings out of the mass of variants;

(5) or finally we may be referring to her poems as altered, revised, regularized, tidied-up and smoothed out so as to be made to look more 'normal' and acceptable to ordinary readers. At this fifth and furthest remove from ED's own drafts, we are given a text by a towering genius as modified by someone who was far less than a genius, and who has usually damaged the poem in various ways.

The present 2-volume set of 'The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson' brings us as close to the real thing as most of us will ever get. It gives us photographic facsimiles, with full scholarly apparatus, not of all of her poems but of those she bound into forty fascicles, tiny hand-stitched manuscript-books that she squirreled away in her room and that were not to be discovered until after her death many years later.

Here you can see how her strange handwriting changed radically over the years. Here you can see all of the peculiarities of her spelling. Here you can see all those little asterisks which she used to indicate an alternate word elsewhere on the page, usually at the foot. Here you can also see all of her line breaks and her idiosyncrasies of spacing, both of which are often highly significant. Here, in a word, you can see the hand of a genius at work.

Personally I think we are extremely fortunate to have these two volumes, and that all lovers of ED's amazing poems, poems that are one of the wonders of the world, should be grateful to R. W. Franklin for the arduous labors that must have gone into his impeccable edition, an edition with full scholarly apparatus that provides a wealth of fascinating information about the forty fascicles.

The two large, heavy and sturdy volumes are stitched, bound in half cloth, beautifully printed on a very strong, smooth, ivory tinted paper that we are told is the finest paper in the world and I can well believe it, and they come in a buckram-covered box.

It's clear that no pains have been spared to give us, not only accurate and annotated photographic facsimiles of every page of the Manuscript Books, but also to give them to us in sturdy and beautiful volumes that are a fitting vehicle for the works of the amazing woman we know as Emily Dickinson. How astounded and gratified she would have been to have seen this set, a set that would warm the heart of any bibliophile, and that belongs in the collection of all Dickinson enthusiasts.