I Never Came to You in White: A Novel about Emily Dickinson - Softcover

Farr, Professor Emerita Of English & American Literature Georgetown University Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786755806 ISBN 13: 9780786755806

Publisher: Lymehouse Productions, Inc., 2014

Synopsis

In 1847 Edward Dickinson’s daughter Emily was seventeen, a student at Mary Lyon’s female seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Thrilled by the challenges of her education, yet repressed by the school atmosphere, she began writing letters home and to the friends she felt lonely for----passionate letters that reveled in bubbling and irreverent mischief and declared the affectionate intensity of the budding poet. Later, after her death at the age of fifty-five, friends and relatives exchanged misunderstandings of the woman they had known----and of the poetic treasure that they had no sure way of evaluating.

Out of these sixty-six imagined letters, Judith Farr, herself a poet and Dickinson scholar, has created a brilliant novel, which, written in the language of Emily Dickinson’s contemporaries, lays out the entire emotional spectrum of her life. We see the young Emily groping toward poetic expression. We share the bewilderment of her teachers and friends as the girl reacts with the ingenuity of genius to people, books, and events. We marvel at her private letters To a Mysterious Person.” We smile with her at the confusion of others as they struggle to keep up with the poet’s imagination, at those who try to correct” her mode of expression. We share the experience of the first man to take her photograph. We watch her die, dreadfully and prematurely. When we are done, we have shared in a wondrous mystery, for we are the only ones allowed to know who Emily Dickinson was: these letters are written to us.

As Diane Wood Middlebrook has written, This work of fiction---meticulously researched, delicately attuned to the language of the times---provides an explanation more persuasive than any biography ever will, of what happened to the girl on the brink of womanhood to make her the person who wrote those poems. A startling good read.”

Peculiar, incandescent, astonishing”
-The New Yorker

About this title

Review:

Judith Farr, the author of The Passion of Emily Dickinson and the editor of Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays takes a great risk in her first novel I Never Came to You in White, which is, for all intents and purposes, a fictionalized biography of Dickinson. But Farr is on solid ground. Focusing on Dickinson's teen years, Farr recreates through fictional letters the mid-19th-century world the poet inhabited. The device allows Farr to explore questions of Dickinson's sexuality and faith. The result is a novel that offers an intriguing and insightful glimpse into the life of a poet whose eccentricity and genius have made her an elusive subject for those who have studied her life and read her work.

About the Author:

Judith Farr is also the author of The Passion of Emily Dickinson (which the New York Times Book Review designated as a "Notable Book" in 1992) and The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (which in 2005 was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy for the best book written in English by a woman that year). Dr. Farr is Professor Emerita of English at Georgetown University and has written and lectured widely on Emily Dickinson and American Literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Lymehouse Productions, Inc.
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0786755806
• ISBN 13: 9780786755806
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 238