To contextualize Emily Dickinson is a huge task. There are various collections in the field of Dickinson studies which seek to synthesize critical work together with assessments of Dickinson's critical heritage – The Emily Dickinson Handbook, edited by Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbuchle and Cristanne Miller (1998) being the superlative example of these. This somewhat ambitious volume of thirty-three essays, which seeks to “orient readers to the shifting, unsettling, expanding world of Emily Dickinson” (6), is divided into four sections that serve to guide readers through this daunting terrain. The first of these, entitled “Local Environments,” provides solid ground in the form of five innovative essays which cover topics ranging from Dickinson's Amherst, and her education, Puritan heritage, natural environment and libraries. Whilst covering hitherto established critical ground, each scholar brings new research and a fresh approach to their subject. Eleanor Elson Heginbotham's essay “Reading in the Dickinson Libraries,” the second chapter in the collection, takes the reader into the world of Dickinson scholarship as well as her own (“I began at the Jones Library”) and in doing so sets the scene of exploration evident in the rest of the volume.

Part Two examines literary contexts and traces Dickinson's literary sources, influences and intertextual engagements. The wide-ranging scope of this section is indicated by each of the eight short but not always entirely convincingly indicative essay titles, for example “The Bible,” “Shakespeare” and “Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century Literature,” through to her reading of periodicals. It serves to orient the reader in the trajectory of Dickinson's reading and in doing so also, in most cases, informs us of critical engagement with it. For example, Emily Seelbinder's essay on the Bible highlights the strength of earlier scholarship (Jay Leyda) as much as it showcases the usefulness of the digitized Dickinson archive. Cristanne Miller's essay on Dickinson's literary predecessors and Páraic Finnerty's on transatlantic women writers both provide fresh and stimulating readings of her various engagements with her influences. The twelve essays in Part Three, which come under the heading “Social, Cultural, Political, and Intellectual Contexts,” again provide a survey of those contexts which are key to understanding Dickinson's poetry, and seem in part to take up where Vivian Pollak's Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson (2003) left off. Extending the historicist turn in Dickinson studies, from James McIntosh and Shira Wolosky on religion and gender respectively, through to Faith Barrett on slavery and the Civil War, Sandra Runzo on popular culture, Sabine Sielke on natural sciences and Jed Deppman on philosophy, what follows is also a foray into the range and scope of Dickinson criticism at its dazzling best. Wolosky's brilliant and incisive essay “Gendered Poetics” places gender within the sphere of Dickinson's public engagement, thus moving criticism in this area forward.

The final section of the volume will undoubtedly be extremely valuable to scholars, as it provides eight skilfully constructed essays which reassess the reception of Dickinson's work, including its editorial history as well as the critical heritage of the past, whilst also highlighting the latest contemporary critical interventions. However, at this point the reader is also left wanting more of the current thought-provoking criticism of the previous sections. The rehearsal of the critical past seems rather too brief when measured against these preceding sections. And this appears to be the only problem with this collection; a guide to the critical heritage of Dickinson studies is undoubtedly required, but at this point the book fulfils this requirement only partially. It offers some recommended reading and a useful chronology, pointing towards its potential function as a resource for students, but is not fully comprehensive enough to achieve the aim its title suggests. There were frequent missed opportunities to include more material by emergent scholars rather than including multiple essays by the same author. For example, Parts Two and Three both seem poorer without the inclusion of recent work done on Dickinson's various engagements with hymn culture. Richards concedes in the Introduction that there is, of course, more to say on Dickinson and there are further critical roads to pursue. The section on critical reception may well have been better employed in a parallel project, making room for more new and genuinely exploratory critical essays. Whilst not quite accomplishing the user-friendliness of a critical guide, the book excels – and its strength lies – in being an up-to-date collection of new and innovative research by some exemplary and established Dickinson scholars. The title of the collection is ambitious, but perhaps also, at the same time, not quite ambitious enough.