In his introduction to The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), Thomas H. Johnson asserted that Dickinson ‘did not live in history and held no view of it, past or current’ and that her ‘rejection of society … shows itself to have been total, not only physically but psychically’. This paternalistic miscasting of Dickinson as the fey ‘Myth’ of Amherst, clad in her snow-white dress, began ... (read more)
Eleanor Spencer-Regan

Eleanor Spencer-Regan is an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and the Principal of Janet Clarke Hall, Australia’s first residential college for women. She is a former Frank Knox Memorial Scholar at Harvard University. Her research interests include modern and contemporary British and American poetry, and children’s and Young Adult literature. Publications include Family in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Routledge, 2023) and American Poetry since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
In 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word ‘hangry’, defined as ‘bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger’. Incidentally, the word ‘mansplain’ was also added in 2018. If you are not familiar with this one, I am sure there is a man nearby who will be happy to enlighten you. Reading Monika Kim’s début novel, The Eyes Are the Best Part, I began to wonder whether we ma ... (read more)