Her legend was also remarkably well preserved; she carried it from Hungarian girlhood to the weeks before her death.

After a gregarious girlhood, it was said, Dickinson had gradually become a near-total recluse, known around Amherst as “the myth.”

While her take on her girlhood is rife with self-pity, her accounts of her breakthrough into transgressive-subversive performance can be exhilarating.