In Our Time

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Comedian Frank Skinner has picked the episode on the life and work of the poet Emily Dickinson and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly after the broadcast and will be longer than the version broadcast on Radio 4). Emily Dickinson was arguably the most startling and original poet in America in the C19th. According to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her correspondent and mentor, writing 15 years after her death, "Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson into a posthumous fame only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life and by her aversion to even a literary publicity." That was in 1891 and, as more of Dickinson's poems were published, and more of her remaining letters, the more the interest in her and appreciation o