Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours by Marta Werner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours by Marta Werner Alexandra Socarides (bio) Werner, Marta. Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours. Amherst College Press, 2021. 125 pp., $35.00. I feel I must begin with an admission: I have never much cared about “The Master Letters.” This is a kind of blasphemy in Dickinson studies, I know, and I’ve tried for years to talk myself out of this position. My main objection to all the fuss over these three little documents is that, no matter how hard I tried, I never really understood why they had been grouped together in the first place. Their connections to each other felt dubious at best, for I couldn’t hear a consistent voice or perspective across the texts, nor could I decipher that there was any element of a related compositional process at work. Being told there is a connection between documents that I considered unconnected made them harder to read than [End Page 169] Dickinson’s other hard-to-read texts. Because of this, all I felt in their presence was great loss. These were, I reasoned, the unlost pieces of a larger set of lost documents, and every time I tried to grasp at them, I registered all that I did not understand about where they came from and what they were, over and over again. But then Marta Werner got hold of them and everything changed. The first thing she did was give language to my resistance, confirming all that we don’t know about them and everything that is difficult about them, writing that these documents “present beautiful and overwhelming obstacles for decoding” (25). And then, as often happens when one feels seen, I eased into her project, thinking maybe I could trust her to take me on this ride, since she too was skeptical of the “inviolate trinity” into which print had turned these documents (13). Also, I knew from being familiar with Werner’s other work that she would be thoughtful, generous, and deeply dedicated to the documents at hand. In short, if anyone was going to bring me around, it would be her. There is no single thing that Werner does in Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours that injects life into these documents; instead, it is the accumulation of her attentions to every aspect of them, as well as to all that surrounds them, that reveals what is truly interesting about them. Her overarching approach is to destabilize our inherited assumptions about these texts, thereby opening up space for a fresh analysis. For example, instead of calling them “The Master Letters,” as past critics have done, she calls them “master documents,” adding two texts to the constellation, with excellent justification for doing so; she does a new and extensive analysis of textual dating, while also acknowledging the “essential uncertainty at the heart of dating Dickinson’s manuscripts”; she explains how these texts got tied together in the first place and their subsequent (and somewhat dubious) print history; she challenges the motivations of past critics—especially Johnson—going so far as to question their investments in these documents as a set; she gives readers several different ways to view the documents (photographic, print renderings, and typographic facsimilies); she creates a “Writing Line” for each document, which appears as a fold out, and includes the “writings circulated,” “writings retained,” and “historic national events” that occur between the writing of each text; and she produces new readings of all five texts, startling us, as Werner always does, with her insights not just about Dickinson, but about our closeness to and distance from Dickinson (46, 53–57). The book is called Writing in Time, and Werner not only tracks Dickinson’s time but calls attention to a host of different ways of thinking about time. Time, in other words, seeps in everywhere. Even in moments of close reading, Werner steps back and calls attention to time at its most simple. For instance, in her reading of [End Page 170] “Dear Master / I am ill – ” (A 827), she writes, “Though it is written by a person who no longer exists, A 827...