Notes on Dickinson's publication history

Emily Dickinson: Dec. 10, 1830 to May 15, 1886

1775 poems altogether

Fascicles contained about 800 poems

10 poems and 1 short prose piece published in her lifetime; 7 poems in the Springfield Republican (including “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”)

Thomas Wentworth Higginson: author and abolitionist. “Letter to a Young Contributor” in the Atlantic Monthly

Dickinson sent “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” and 3 other poems along with a letter asking him “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”

Susan Dickinson: married Austin Dickinson, Emily and Lavinia’s older brother; lived next door to the Dickinson sisters, was a close friend of Emily’s. Susan read and responded to Dickinson’s poems.

Mabel Loomis Todd: ongoing affair with Austin Dickinson. Enlisted TW Higginson to help edit and publish Dickinson’s poems posthumously.

Todd & Higginson, eds.: Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890); Poems, Second Series (1891).

Todd, ed.: Poems, Third Series (1896).

Martha Dickinson Bianchi: Susan Dickinson’s daughter, Emily Dickinson’s niece.

Bianchi, ed.: The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime (1914); Further Poems of Emily Dickinson, Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia (1929).

Millicent Todd Bingham: Mabel Loomis Todd’s daughter.

Bingham, ed.: Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson (1945).

Thomas H. Johnson, ed.: Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955).

R.W. Franklin, ed.: The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981).