So let's start with the strangely polarizing reviews around this book. There is no small number of dismissive one-sentence summary-judgments about its value. I suspect that this is because of a shallow bar of expectation: "all books about Emily Dickinson must be simple biography or academic analysis, and the author must take a distant backseat to present the unarguable facts." This is, of course, nonsense.

Personal scholarship, uniquely poets writing of poets, hybrid forms of genre (here creative memoir and biography/analysis) are all established and sound means into understanding their subjects. The notion of impartiality or objectivity in analysis (quaint as it is) is difficult to defend. As individual readers, we each phenomenologically wrestle with the texts before us, discover what we ourselves find (layered on top of the archaeology of our own reading experiences), and share it as much for its process of meaning-making as for what it discovers.

In Howe's case, that often means an analysis that at times waxes poetic itself, because--stay with me, doubters and haters--it is entirely possible that the subtlety and complexity of poetic meaning itself defies common exposition.   Howe embraces this, and what results is not  another dry, academic, and largely wrong-minded judgment of Dickinson's life and works (we truly have enough of these, really); instead it is a sometimes associative, figurative, thoroughly-researched redemption of the work of one of America's most powerful poets. 

Howe accomplishes the redemption in the first two chapters, demonstrating how the historical textbook portrayals of Dickinson fulfill patriarchal expectations for an unmarried domestic poet. She argues cleanly and clearly that Dickinson's "intellectual conscience" is not to be under-estimated, reveals in plain terms the multi-valent roles of the omnipresent dash and the not arbitrary capitalization. If that means a passage like the following must be itself as poetry, juxtaposition of concept, in order to apply it by analogy, it's a gift:

Yes, expect some passages like this (and linger there) and with this lingering approach the text assembled together from various sources to see what Dickinson herself experienced. Then, when we look again at her verse . . . 

And, after those first two chapters, the final lengthy and extraordinary examination on "My life had stood -- a Loaded Gun" in the light/shadow of Browning's "Childe Roland"!  Yes, Howe reaches richly into American Calvinism, into Manifest Destiny, into the Civil War, into her anxious relationship with Higginson and others, but she also breathes relationships between the texts which Dickinson had close: Shakespeare, Cooper, Brown, E. Bronte, her newspapers. Instead of drawing academically-tidy irrational "causal" relationships, Howe offers sensibilities, circumstances, and that ever-elusive rendering of meaning which permeates all verse. 

Readers considering this text are wise to open-mindedly see the architecture Howe works with, to read the book (as with all texts) as it is presented instead of a lazy tradition of prejudgment. Howe sets her own infrastructure in place early on: Stein, Cixous, Gilbert & Gumar, others. She says plainly as she writes of Thoreau's Concord River, the river that will carry him into time: "Emily Dickinson is my emblematic Concord River."  From a powerful poet writing and redeeming a historical genius, her mission and approach could not be more plain.