The first thing to say about this dual portrait of two old-and-famous literary friends is that it spares the rest of us a great deal of effort: We don’t have to fathom or imagine what brought the two of them together, for this work has been done for us. Brenda Wineapple’s reconsideration of the complex twenty-four-year camaraderie of the poet Emily Dickinson and the literary “man of action” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, both of them post-Puritan New Englanders, follows the two of them closely and over many years—beyond the span of their natural lives, in fact. Wineapple peers at each life separately, and in detail, even before assaying her main subject: What was this friendship, and its regrets? What did Dickinson and Higginson offer each other? Why have critics, to date, belittled him unmercifully, while routinely elevating Emily to the status of a saint?
Wineapple does not write to glorify Dickinson, nor does she debunk. Instead, her goal is a realistic, analytic depiction in three dimensions, mostly unpolemical. Higginson emerges as a fascinating character in his own right who just might be understood, at last. Dickinson, on the other hand, remains a gamin puzzlement, ferocious in her provocations. But then, apparently, she wanted that.
Higginson was many things: a Harvard man and onetime preacher; an enterprising abolitionist; a Civil War colonel of the “first federally authorized” regiment of freed slaves; a tireless supporter of women’s rights; a well-known essayist, lecturer, poet; and a would-be father and
