3 MARTHA NELL SMITH Susan and Emily Dickinson: their lives, in letters She [Lavinia Dickinson] feels a little baffled by my possession of so many mss. of Emily's. -Susan Dickinson to William Hayes editor of The Independent, 14 March 1891 The first poem "To Sue, is beautiful. I could have wept over it. Some are rather obscure - I must read them many times. Such genius and mysticism as Emily possessed often transcends mortal com- prehension. -Kate Anthon, long-time friend of Susan and Emily, to Martha Dickinson Bianchi upon publication of The Single Hound, ''a volume offered as a memorial to the love of these 'Dear, dead Women/" in 1914 ... Do you remem- ber what whis- pered to "Horatio"? -Emily to Susan Dickinson, spring I886, within weeks of Emily's death. As Hamlet lay dying, he whispered "Report me and my cause aright" and "tell my story" to Horatio. (OMC 2.53) During the first century of public distribution of her literary work, many facts about Emily Dickinson's writing practices and about her decades-long alliance with her Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, have be- come clearer. As her poems moved from manuscript and hand circulation to printed volumes and various editions, tools such as Thomas H. Johnson's var- iorum The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955), his three-volume The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958) with Theodora Ward, Jay Leyda's two-volume Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (r96o), R. W. Franklin's two-volume The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (r98r), and his three-volume var- iorum The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998) have proved indispensable for Dickinson scholars. Yet the facts about Susan and Emily Dickinson,s 51 In CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO EMILY DICKINSON, ed. Wendy Martin. Cambridge, New York, Port Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town: Cambridge UP 2002.