To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Comedian Frank Skinner has picked the episode on the life and work of the poet Emily Dickinson and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly after the broadcast and will be longer than the version broadcast on Radio 4). Emily Dickinson was arguably the most startling and original poet in America in the C19th. According to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her correspondent and mentor, writing 15 years after her death, "Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson into a posthumous fame only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life and by her aversion to even a literary publicity." That was in 1891 and, as more of Dickinson's poems were published, and more of her remaining letters, the more the interest in her and appreciation of her grew. With her distinctive voice, her abundance, and her exploration of her private world, she is now seen by many as one of the great lyric poets.

With

Fiona Green Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College

Linda Freedman Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College London

and

Paraic Finnerty Reader in English and American Literature at the University of Portsmouth

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Reading list:

Christopher Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (Penguin Books, 2009)

Jed Deppman, Marianne Noble and Gary Lee Stonum (eds.), Emily Dickinson and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Judith Farr, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2005)

Judith Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 1992)

Paraic Finnerty, Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006)

Ralph William Franklin (ed.), The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (University Massachusetts Press, 1998)

Ralph William Franklin (ed.), The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (Harvard University Press, 1998)

Linda Freedman, The Myth of the Fall in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford University Press, 2025), especially chapter 3.

Linda Freedman, Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle and Cristanne Miller (eds.), The Emily Dickinson Handbook (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)

Alfred Habegger, My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Early Life of Emily Dickinson (Random House, 2001)

Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith (eds.), Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris Press, 1998)

Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton University Press, 2013)

Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters (first published 1958; Harvard University Press, 1986)

Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), Poems of Emily Dickinson (first published 1951; Faber & Faber, 1976)

Thomas Herbert Johnson and Theodora Ward (eds.), The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1958)

Benjamin Lease, Emily Dickinson’s Readings of Men and Books (Palgrave Macmillan, 1990)

Mary Loeffelholz, The Value of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

James McIntosh, Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown (University of Michigan Press, 2000)

Marietta Messmer, A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001)

Cristanne Miller (ed.), Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved (Harvard University Press, 2016)

Cristanne Miller, Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012)

Elizabeth Phillips, Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988)

Eliza Richards (ed.), Emily Dickinson in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (first published 1974; Harvard University Press, 1998)

Marta L. Werner, Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (University of Michigan Press, 1996)

Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Anchor Books, 2009)

Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (Yale University Press, 1984)

This episode was first broadcast in May 2017.

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our world

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production