Emily Dickinson's Henry James

Abstract

The year after the 1878 publication of Henry James's The Europeans , Emily Dickinson refers to the novel or its author twice in her epistolary writing. This article suggests that her two evocations of James provide further insights into the poet's relationships with the recipients of the letters, Elizabeth Holland and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Writing Holland, Dickinson deploys characters from The Europeans sympathetically, in a complex articulation of the necessity of women's spiritual and artistic self-determination. Her letter to Higginson is a response to his Short Studies of American Authors ; the poet seems to recognize that Higginson's objections to James's style echo his advice about her own work. Throughout his critical corpus and in his essay on James in Short Studies , Higginson conflates heteronormative ideals of gender with literary quality and true American citizenship. In these letters, Dickinson uses James and his characters to complicate the specifically gendered notions (of behavior, of style, of authorial citizenship) important to these correspondents.