All posts tagged: Emily Dickinson

The Networked Recluse: The Connected World of Emily Dickinson

Reviewed by Sarah Kinniburgh, College of William and Mary Colin Bailey, Michael Kelly, Carolyn Vega, Marta Werner, Susan Howe. The Networked Recluse: The Connected World of Emily Dickinson. Amherst, Massachusetts: Amherst College Press, 2017. 185 pp.  In The Networked Recluse: The Connected World of Emily Dickinson (Amherst College Press, 2017), a team of leading Dickinson scholars, curators, and poets takes up the task of contextualizing a figure in the American literary canon that has historically been understood as one-dimensional. In the popular imaginary, Dickinson is “lady in white” at best, total outcast at worst. A welcome complication of this portrait, Networked Recluse constructs Dickinson’s life as uniquely configured through her family and her broader circuits of correspondence in the town of Amherst in the years around the American Civil War. The volume was designed to accompany I’m Nobody! Who are You? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson, an exhibit which ran from January through May 2017 at the Morgan Library & Museum, and, as such, benefits from the combined expertise and care of Mike Kelly, …