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Emily Dickinson; Concordance to the Letters of

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MacKenzie's concordance provides an invaluable new resource to scholars and serious readers of Emily Dickinson. The reference covers all of the over 1000 surviving letters of the poet from the Johnson 3-volume edition.

Not since the Rosenbaum concordance to the poems which appeared in 1964 has a resource been made available that will garner such prolonged interest and use from scholars. With each entry, MacKenzie provides the year (Johnson's dating when the original letter is undated), the frequency of use, the Johnson volume and letter number, page, and line number. In addition, each entry has a brief context from the original sentence in which it appears.

For a poet about whom so little is known and for whom words were so few and so well chosen, a concordance provides surprising and enlightening insights. With the increased attention paid to the letters in recent scholarship, this reference could not be produced and made available too soon for those involved in Dickinson studies.

An extraordinary achievement, this is a reference with a long shelf life that belongs in any university library collection and in private libraries of those who enjoy the richness of Dickinson's words.