Having assayed Henry James's father, Habegger takes on a tricky female: the elusive Emily. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

By weaving together a chronologically integrated reading of Emily Dickinson's poetry and correspondence, Habegger has written the most complete and satisfying biography to date of a poet long shrouded in myth and illusion. Scholarly breakthroughs in dating the poems make it possible to limn a pattern of development in Dickinson's poetry previously invisible to critics, just as a newly discovered printer's copy of her letters lays bare personal disclosures excised by her family. For the first time, readers share fully in the private struggle through which Dickinson learned how to transform emotional trauma into art. Careful research traces much of this trauma--and subsequent poetry--to an unreciprocated and agonizingly persistent passion for a charismatic Presbyterian minister. Habegger employs the latest resources not only to open new vistas but also to challenge stubborn misconceptions (that the Civil War scarcely touched Dickinson's imagination, for example, or that Dickinson was a lesbian). Yet for all he has to teach, Habegger finally warns his readers against expecting complete understanding of a poet who hid her poetry from her own family and who defied future generations with riddles and paradoxes. A superb study, too luminous to remain the exclusive property of specialists. --Bryce Christensen

A biography of the elusive Belle of Amherst (1830-86) that celebrates her imaginative witchery and triumph over adversity without penetrating her enigma. Because her sister fulfilled Emily Dickinson's request to burn her correspondence after her death, biographers experience considerable difficulty in sounding the deep currents of her life. To establish how she became so reclusive, Habegger (The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr., 1994) is at great pains to delve into her family-sometimes excessively so (the poet's birth does not occur until page 72). Her father, Edward Dickinson, a lawyer and one-term Whig congressman, was as zealous in guarding his children against all physical and financial danger as he was in claiming that women had no intellectual powers worth exercising. Her brother Austin, who lived with his wife next door to Edward and Emily, was too narrowly egotistical to appreciate Emily's writing and in later years embarked on an affair that affected posthumous publication of her work. Deaths involving close relatives and friends when she was young led Dickinson into existential doubt about God's justice, making her the lone family holdout from the local Congregational Church. Given these circumstances, Habegger plausibly suggests, Emily "perfected the art of living separately in close proximity," discovering boundless independence and creative freedom even as her outer world contracted. Using extensive research on her associations, he adroitly analyzes Dickinson's intense attachments: friendships with fellow schoolgirls, relationships with male intellectuals such as Atlantic Monthly editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and particularly her late-blooming romance with Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly jurist and friend of her father. Yet, despite his chronological organization, Habegger never helps the reader get a handle on the stages of Dickinson's development as poet and adult, and he sometimes dismisses claims of earlier Dickinson scholars without offering an equally adequate explanation for events. In the end, in an irony she would have appreciated, another biographer has mapped Dickinson's outer world without leaving adequate markers for her interior landscape.

In his ambitious biography, Habegger (formerly, Univ. of Kansas) builds on the numerous studies that have been published since Richard Sewall's two-volume The Life of Emily Dickinson (CH, Jun'75). The result is the most extensively researched, painstakingly documented, and comprehensive portrait of Dickinson ever to emerge. Although Dickinson remains a complex and enigmatic figure, Habegger's meticulous study enhances the reader's understanding of the multiple influences on the poet's art. Most notably, he challenges earlier studies that depicted Dickinson's life as a series of separate incidents and relationships, rather than examining it as an integrative whole. Habegger insightfully tackles persistent questions about Dickinson's sexuality, her reclusiveness, her political views, her feminism, and her health. He also disputes earlier characterizations of Dickinson's poetry as static, arguing instead that the poet's work underwent a "dramatic evolution" and that many of her poems "bear the impress of current experience." Also of note in this edition is the inclusion of an extensive gallery of portraits and photographs, including the recently discovered daguerreotype purported to be of Dickinson in her early thirties. Highly recommended for general readers and for academic libraries serving readers at all levels. D. D. Knight SUNY College at Cortland

Making perceptive use of feminist scholarship of the past three decades, the firsthand reports of Dickinson's intimates and careful readings of her lyrics and letters, former University of Kansas English professor Habegger creates a newly complex portrait of the poet's life (1830-86) and greatly enhances our understanding of her art. As in The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr., Habegger analyzes his subject's experiences from a modern perspective without obscuring the very different ways in which she herself perceived them. His greatest achievement is a nuanced depiction of how Dickinson transformed the limits placed on her into choices that enabled her poetry. Kept close to home in Amherst, Mass., by her authoritarian father, she chose to become a recluse and avoid altogether the social duties laid on middle-class women. Painfully rejected more than once as a young woman because of her extreme emotional neediness, she assumed a "childish" air that allowed her far more freedom of expression than that accorded New England's adults. "The blessing and the wound became one and the same," writes Habegger. "What that seems to mean for us is that her great genius is not to be distinguished from her madness." Habegger also gives full attention to the impact of the religious revival that swept New England in Dickinson's youth, reminding us of how tough young Emily had to resist intense pressure to declare herself "saved." Habegger rejects the traditional view that Dickinson's work and life were static; "her poetry shows a striking and dramatic evolution," he declares, and his immensely satisfying narrative makes the largely interior struggles she conducted over the course of 55 years just as dramatic. This is as good as literary biography gets. (On sale Oct. 2) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

It's hard to imagine how Richard Sewall's magnificent and elegantly written two-volume life of Dickinson (The Life of Emily Dickinson, LJ 11/1/74) can be surpassed. Wisely, Habegger (The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr.) concurs that Sewall's study remains the finest of the few biographies of the enigmatic New England poet. Even so, this new biography weaves newly available letters and other research notably the various drafts of the poetry gathered in R.W. Franklin's three-volume variorum edition of Dickinson's poems into a fascinating narrative of her life and development as a writer. Because of the uncertainty about the correct dates of her poems, many previous biographies, Sewall's included, viewed Dickinson as a poet who achieved the pinnacle of her creativity by the time she was 25. Using these newly available materials, Habegger ably traces Dickinson's evolution as a writer from her early childhood in the 1830s to her poetry of sex, isolation, and death in the 1860s and 1870s. He insightfully weaves Dickinson's poems into his narrative, showing clearly how her life and her poetry were bound together. In the end, however, Habegger reaches much the same conclusion as Sewall. No matter how much we reveal about her life and work, Dickinson will remain an enigma, just as she will remain, with Whitman, a seminal poet of the United States. Habegger's eloquent study deserves a place alongside Sewall's biography in all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/01.] Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.