'Will You Ignore My Sex?': Emily Dickinson's 1862 Letters to T. W. Higginson Revisited

• Published in: The Emily Dickinson journal Vol. 29; no. 2; pp. 91 - 122
• Main Authors: Wang, Baihua, Fan, Xiaohong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.01.2020
• Subjects: 19th century; American literature; Anxiety; Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886); Females; Gender; Gender identity; Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (1823-1911); Historicism; Identity; Literary criticism; Men; Metaphor; Poetry; Poets; Self concept; Women; Writers; Writing

Drawing insights from critical studies of gender and nineteenth-century American women's poetry, this essay examines the letters sent from Dickinson to Higginson in 1862 in order to alert readers to hear the implicit plea in these often abrupt, imperative, elliptical, and cryptic documents: &qu...