Emily Dickinson's Open Folios

“Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing” is a scholarly facsimile edition and aesthetic exploration of forty late holograph drafts and fragments by Emily Dickinson, traditionally identified as the “Lord letters.

” Presented on high-quality paper, the manuscripts appear in full facsimile alongside diplomatic transcriptions designed to preserve the shock of Dickinson’s script and the rich visual details inscribed on the pages.

Marta L. Werner argues that editorial practice must be rethought to attend to elements normally effaced by conventional print editions, and she experiments with “un-editing” as a way to foreground the interplay between medium and message in Dickinson’s work.

Her commentary takes the form of speculative, fragmentary close-ups rather than a single linear argument, proposing acts of reading and writing as visual poems and offering a major resource for Dickinson scholars, textual critics, editorial theorists, and gender and cultural studies researchers interested in women’s writing and its material transmission.