Emily Dickinson Archive

Coming Fall 2013

The Emily Dickinson Archive will make high-resolution images of manuscripts of Dickinson’s poetry and letters available in open access, along with transcriptions and annotations from historical and scholarly editions. The first release, planned for Fall 2013, will focus on the corpus of poems identified in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1998).

The goal of this site is to gather in one place images of all surviving Dickinson autograph manuscripts and letters; contemporary transcripts of Dickinson poems and letters that do not survive in autograph; and a historical array of editors’ attempts to translate those autograph materials into printed form. The Emily Dickinson Archive is designed to inspire new scholarship and discourse on this literary icon.

Advisory Board

  • Leslie A. Morris, Houghton Library, General Editor
  • Sharon Cameron, Johns Hopkins University
  • Julia Flanders, Brown University
  • Michael Kelly, Amherst College Library
  • Mary Loeffelholz, Northeastern University
  • Cristanne Miller, University at Buffalo, SUNY
  • Domhnall Mitchell, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • Martha Nell Smith, University of Maryland
  • Marta Werner, D’Youville College

Key Features

  • Find poems easily with multiple index and reference tools
  • Study the poet’s own handwriting, variants, and arrangement of her work
  • Read and compare editions, word choice, and transcriptions through time
  • Facilitate new scholarship by providing tools for creating annotations, transcriptions, and reading lists

The Emily Dickinson Archive seeks partnerships with and contributions from many organizations, scholars, and collections. In addition to Harvard University Press, early collaborators include:

The platform for the Emily Dickinson Archive will be developed by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in collaboration with the Harvard Library. Initial funding and project support has been provided by The Sidney Verba Fund, Harvard Library; the Emily Dickinson Fund, Houghton Library; and Harvard University Press.

View works by and about Emily Dickinson from Harvard University Press »

Manuscript page showing six stanzas in Emily Dickinson’s handwriting, starting with: “Hope” is the thing with feathers / To die — takes just a little while

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers / To die — takes just a little while
Fascicle 13, Sheet 2, Pages 2–3. Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886. MS Am 1118.3 (46b–c)

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