Can I consult Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts and personal books?
Dickinson’s very fragile poems and letters are restricted, but we make photostat copies available to readers in the Reading Room. A facsimile edition of her fascicles is also available: The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson: A Facsimile Edition. 2 vols. Ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). Her Herbarium has been published by Harvard University Press and digitized. In rare cases where the nature of a scholar’s work requires seeing some of the original manuscripts, application must be made to the Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts for permission to work with individual items.
