White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2008) by Brenda Wineapple

2018-10-01T12:00:24-04:00

Critical Evaluation   “Conventional wisdom has it you can tell a lot about a person by the company he or she keeps. But, what if posterity makes a big mistake in judging a famous somebody's friends; wouldn't that blunder then trigger a huge misreading of the chief person of interest? There you have the reasoning underlying Brenda Wineapple's fascinating new book, White Heat, which explores the relationship between Emily Dickinson and one of her closest confidants, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. For decades, Higginson has been derided by Dickinson scholars and fans as a kindly oaf, a Victorian man of minor letters damned with [...]