Vivian R. Pollak has written a marvelous book that contributes significantly to the scholarly understanding of Emily Dickinson's influence on women poets and the fraught nature of an American female poetic tradition. Pollak forthrightly acknowledges her debt “to other studies of the sexual poetic for which Dickinson serves as the compass and chart” (17), thereby situating herself within an established academic corpus that seeks to delineate a tradition for American women poets. Previous studies such as Cheryl Walker's 1982 The Nightingale's Burden, Alicia Ostriker's 1986 Stealing the Language, and Betsy Erkkila's 1992 Wicked Sisters, as well as works like Sabine Silke's 1997 Fashioning the Female Subject and Zofia Burr's 2002 Of Women, Poetry, and Power, that focus more narrowly on the ways women poets come to terms with Dickinson's presence, represent the academic tradition Pollak extends. Drawing on this tradition, Pollak singles out Erkkila's subtitle, Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord, as a particularly resonant touchstone for her own study. Erkkila's “Discord” becomes Pollak's “Intimacies of Difference,” whereby women poets writing in the post-Dickinson era of American letters simultaneously identify with and distance themselves from Dickinson's life and work. Agreeing with Muriel Rukeyser, Pollak describes “Dickinson's achievement as an extended meditation on the risks of social, psychological, and aesthetic difference” (3). More specifically, Pollak views “Dickinson's psychological ambivalence about her relationship to her actual and potential readers” as the basis for her appeal to women writers who identify with her ambivalence but choose to cope with it differently. For Pollak, “this ambivalence, however productive, has significantly influenced [Dickinson's] reception,” interrupting “what we might think of as a coherent genealogy of American women's poetry” (3). In her conclusion Pollak suggests that what is true for American women writers applies to all of Dickinson's readers: “Her paradoxical self-awareness encourages us to draw close and to keep our distance” (266).

The six central chapters that make up Our Emily Dickinsons examine Dickinson's influence on the lives of five American women, all but one of whom is a canonical American poet. The exception is Mabel Loomis Todd, the woman Pollak presents as a “reader-ally” who worked “alone and with others, at times with almost maniacal energy,” to transform “Dickinson from a virtually anonymous coterie poet into a writer who clarified for wider publics both the terrors and the pleasures of what became a collective social and literary text” (72). Pollak's first chapter explores Helen Hunt Jackson's ineffectual efforts to convince Dickinson to publish during her lifetime; her second traces Todd's success at bringing the posthumous Dickinson into print and placing her in the public eye. Chapters 3 through 6 track the way Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop come to terms with Dickinson in their private lives and in their writing. Pollak dedicates her fourth chapter, “Moore, Plath, Hughes, and ‘the Literary Life’,” to the complex biographical interconnections that shaped these writers’ engagements with Dickinson. Pollak is admirably clear about each writer's distinct take on Dickinson: “Todd emphasized Dickinson's ability to withstand social pressure; Jackson focused on her supposed failure to help others; Moore questioned the wholesomeness of Dickinson's life … Plath attempted to neutralize Dickinson as a rival,” and “Bishop found her an overly demanding friend” (17). What most interests Pollak, and what makes her book such a fascinating read, is her ability to contextualize the lives of her subjects so that we see how each writer's unique life story informed a version of Dickinson they could both embrace and keep at arm's length.

A distinct strength of this book is Pollak's ability to weave a lifetime of scholarship throughout her chronicle of literary influence with such grace that it reads like a fluid sequence of mini biographies, each of which communicates the often dramatic self-scrutiny that accompanied each writer's efforts to come to terms with Dickinson. In richly textured, interdisciplinary narratives, Pollak finds a way to condense the entire lives of her five primary subjects, so that her reader appreciates the unique personal and social forces that to a large extent dictated their responses to Dickinson. We come, for example, to understand how Mabel Loomis Todd's early life as “a charming only child” (76) and her unconventional marriage to David Peck Todd led to her extramarital affair with Austin Dickinson and her dedication to the publication of Dickinson poems. As Pollak puts it, “To think of [Todd] at age twenty-eight as not only handsome and richly dressed and erotically desirous but also as intellectually, socially, and economically ambitious is accurate” (88). With delightful dexterity, Pollak presents Todd's promotion of Dickinson's poems as a determined effort “to disrupt” (89) the “genteel stereotype” (88) associated with the poetess tradition Mark Twain mocks through Emmeline Grangerford, his caricature of the American poetess who appears in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). “I have come to think,” Pollak writes, “of the collaboration between Emily Dickinson and other women, including Mabel Loomis Todd, as Emmeline Grangerford's revenge” (89). Not everyone will agree with Pollak's assessment of Todd, or her explanations of how Jackson, Moore, Plath, and Bishop make sense of Dickinson, but this will not diminish their appreciation for the depth of Pollak's scholarship and the skill and wit that make her book a pleasure to read.