A tragic love affair has been the natural hypothesis, and search for clues has produced an embarrassment of possible candidates. All Emily’s letters resemble her poems enough in economy and intensity so that despite her own elision and the subsequent editing many still approach love letters in effect. On their internal and some external evidence, she seems to have felt real warmth for a number of men with whom she enjoyed intellectual communion, from her near-contemporary George Gould in the late 1840s to Judge Otis Lord, her father’s friend, eighteen years her senior, in her later life. To each of a half-dozen potential candidates, one biographer or another has assigned responsibility for the heartbreak in her poetry and her willful seclusion. But in every case, objective support is meager, and the necessary assumptions have reflected the theorist’s predilections quite as much as his subject’s. As the quantity of poetry and correspondence in print has increased, however, the different editors’ versions of some duplicate material have invited comparison, and from this and much peripheral research Rebecca Patterson has suggested in _The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_ (1951) a pattern of departure from the norm which brings its subject within the range of the present study. Mrs. Patterson presents the integrated results of three separate investigations. First, she has studied Emily’s life story exhaustively: the puritan background in Amherst; emotional tensions in the family circle (Emily’s father, whom she both loved and inwardly defied, forbade at least one marriage and tried to prevent her writing); Emily’s feelings, convincingly diagnosed as ambivalent, toward the men who captured her interest; and her sometimes more absorbing attachments to certain women. Second, Mrs. Patterson has compiled the objective and emotional biography of Kate Scott Anthon of Cooperstown, New York. This tall, striking, and passionate woman she shows to have been the product of a relatively cosmopolitan milieu, to have been emotionally attracted to women from adolescence in boarding school to ripe old age on the continent (despite a couple of satisfying if short-lived marriages), and to have met and violently loved Emily Dickinson when both young women were about twenty-nine. Third, she has collated all available versions of Emily’s poems and letters (in some of which the sex and number of pronouns were altered or lines omitted by the poet herself or censoring editors), and has re-established chronology which was either deliberately falsified or wishfully confused by the editors to support the legend of a male lover. However unpopular Mrs. Patterson’s hypothesis of a variant passion for Kate Anthon may be, it partly explains the erratic behavior of both the poet herself and her surviving relatives as motivated by fear of scandal. (Sue Gilbert Dickinson in particular, whom Emily’s sister Lavinia branded a