In 1891, five years after her death, Thomas Wentworth Higginson published in the Atlantic Monthly a selection of letters he had received from Emily Dickinson in the early years of their twenty-four-year correspondence. He justifies the publication of the letters, which he claims to do with “much reluctance,” by offering them not as an extension of Dickinson's body of work, but as documents that provide clues to the life and mind of the “partially cracked poetess at Amherst”:

Higginson proposes that Dickinson's epistolary writing is valuable insofar as it offers biographical revelation. Four years later, Mabel Loomis Todd (who compiled the first edition of Dickinson's letters) cites the revelatory quality of the poet's epistolary writing as the reason for her own reluctance to publish the poet's correspondence: “It was with something almost like dread that I approached the task of arranging these letters, lest the deep revelations of a peculiarly shy inner life might so pervade them that in true loyalty to their writer none could be publicly used.”