Emily Dickinson’s fascicles were not discovered until after her death in 1886, ensuring that her poetry would not be publicly recognized and appreciated during her lifetime and leaving the publication of her work in the hands of her editors. Enclosing most of her work in correspondence with family members and editors, she kept her work extremely private. Her two primary editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, both made significant editorial decisions about the presentation of her work prior to publication. Critic Christopher Benfey has argued that Higginson normalized Dickinson’s poems to fit his ideals of artful conventions in poetry, such that any work touched by him before publication was left void of her artistic eccentricities—the very same eccentricities that made her poetry aesthetically and culturally significant. Todd’s editorship is most often viewed as subordinate to Higginson’s, again obscuring Dickinson’s departure from 19^th C conventions of structured verse, as well as changing the poet’s punctuation, rhyme schemes, and titles. What is still unclear, however, is the role that gender norms may have played in the editorial process, certainly for Higginson and Todd, but also for the long lines of their editorial successors throughout the 20^th and 21^st Centuries.

This research project will compare and contrast Higginson’s editorial influence with Todd’s. By addressing the social context and rhetorical situation of the time for both the editors, I will determine to what extent their respective genders influenced their approaches, as well as whether or not social concepts like feminism had any effect on their editing processes. Although it is unclear whether Dickinson gave explicit consent to publish the few poems that were made public during her lifetime, this project will focus on these poems as a starting point in determining her standpoint on published versions of her own poetry.