In his introduction to The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), Thomas H. Johnson asserted that Dickinson ‘did not live in history and held no view of it, past or current’ and that her ‘rejection of society … shows itself to have been total, not only physically but psychically’. This paternalistic miscasting of Dickinson as the fey ‘Myth’ of Amherst, clad in her snow-white dress, began in the poet’s own lifetime (1830-86) and persisted well into the twentieth century. Ironically, Dickinson was aware of her inadvertent mystique, writing to her cousin, ‘Won’t you tell “the public” that at present I wear a brown dress with a cape if possible browner, and carry a parasol of the same!’
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