THE FIVE WOMEN IN THIS BOOK WERE ALL WRITERS WHO LOVED language. They sprinkled ampersands and dashes throughout their private writing, they invented words, and they experimented with spelling. To maintain the lively informality of the women's letters and diaries and to reduce the use of sic, I retained their idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. I quoted them verbatim, with only the rare change of an apostrophe here or there to fit contemporary usage. I also corrected the spelling of a few words to ensure they could be understood. Unless indicated otherwise, all ellipses are mine.
Deciding what names to use when referring to the people in this book has been tricky because of the age-old custom of married women changing their surnames. So I have skirted the problem by referring to the authors by their first names (“Edith”), interspersed with the names by which they are most known (“Edith Wharton”). So that the women's parents could be easily recognized, I tend to refer to them with a title—for example, Mrs. Dickinson, Mr. Barrett, Mr. Brontë.
An even thornier problem has been how to refer to the dogs. Although many animal lovers today choose the word companion to describe a beloved dog, the women in this book referred to their dogs as “pets” and themselves as “owners,” even “mistresses.” Because most of the references to the dogs are in the women's own words, I decided to use their terminology. And when the sex of the dog is unknown, I have used the masculine pronoun because I prefer not to refer to a dog as “it,” and I dislike the awkward she/he construction.
A final remark is about Emily Dickinson. She rarely titled her poems, so they are therefore known and referred to by their first lines, not by a title.