When Richard B. Sewall began work on his biography of Emily Dickinson in 1959, there were already several versions of Dickinson's life available, including books by Thomas H. Johnson (1955), Rebecca Patterson (1951), and Genevieve Taggard (1930). Interpretations of Dickinson's life abounded, driven by the need to explain how a reclusive, single Victorian woman could have produced so many poems, several of them among the greatest American lyrics. George Frisbie Whicher's This Was a Poet, published in 1939, was the standard work and is still a respected interpretive biography. But Whicher, like all scholars who wrote on Dickinson before 1955, was hampered by the lack of definitive texts of her poems. When first published, the poems were severely altered by their first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, to bring them into line with public taste. Before Thomas H. Johnson's The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) there was no uniform edition and hence no idea of the...