Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing

Daneen Wardrop's book, Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing was reviewed by Kirstie Blair in a summary of three books in the June Times Literary Supplement. Blair commented that,“Wardrop is astute on such small distinctions [as the absence of a top button at the neck of the white dress], which suggests the comfortableness of a garment worn around the home, and she works hard to place visual representations of Dickinson and her family, and references to clothing made in the letters and poems, in their nineteenth-century contexts. The long hours Dickinson spent mending and dressmaking, within earshot of the whistle from the nearby Amherst hat factory, and the sense of a shared language of clothing taken for granted by her and her contemporaries, are brought before us in a new light.”