LYNDALL GORDON grew up in Cape Town, came to England through the Rhodes Trust, and was a tutor and lecturer in English at Oxford where she is now Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College. Lyndall is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and member of PEN. Her biographies include Eliot's Early Years (1977) (awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay prize by the British Academy); a sequel, Eliot's New Life, was published at the time of the poet’s centenary (1988). The two books were rewritten as one, T.S.Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1999), with new material collected over twenty years. Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life won the James Tait Black Memorial prize for biography (1984), and Virago recently brought out a revised edition. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (1994), winner of the Cheltenham prize for literature was reissued in 2008. A memoir of three women who died young, Shared Lives (1992), is about women's friendship going back to schooldays in the Cape Town of the fifties. The last book was Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2005). Lyndall is now approaching Emily Dickinson by way of the Dickinson feud. The feud exploded over adultery, but came to focus on the poet. Rival camps claimed her legend over the course of three generations. The book is provisionally entitled “Lives Like Loaded Guns” and will be published by Virago in London, and by Penguin in New York, 2009.

PAUL GILES was Director of the Rothermere American Institute (RAI) at Oxford University, 2003-2008. His books include Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2006); Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2002); Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Hart Crane : The Contexts of "The Bridge" (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

VIVIAN POLLAK is Professor at Washington University, St. Louis. She is the author of Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984) and The Erotic Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and has edited A Poet's Parents: The Courtship Letters of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); New Essays on "Daisy Miller" and "The Turn of the Screw (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

JED DEPPMAN is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Director of Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. He is the author of Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson (University of Massachusetts Press, 20008) and co-editor of Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

DOMHNALL MITCHELL is Professor of English at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is author of Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000) and Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). His volume International Reception of Emily Dickinson co-edited with MARIA STUART is forthcoming in 2009 with Continuum International Publishing.

PARAIC FINNERTY is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006) and is currently working on a book-length project to be titled "The Object of their Affection: The Englishman in America," examining the representation of the Englishman in American culture and how he functions in constructions of American masculinity.

MARIA STUART is College Lecturer at University College, Dublin. Her volume International Reception of Emily Dickinson co-edited with Domhnall Mitchell is forthcoming in 2009 with Continuum International Publishing. She is currently working on a book on Emily Dickinson and biblical interpretation: “Contesting the Word: Emily Dickinson and the Higher Critics.” She is also interested in crime fiction, and is working on a comparative study of American and British crime writing (with particular attention to factors such as race, nationality and gender).

SALLY BUSHELL has a BA from Royal Holloway College, London University, an MA from the University of York and a doctorate from Queens' College, Cambridge. She is also a fully qualified English teacher having spent three years between MA and Ph.D teaching in a secondary school. She is director of graduate studies and co-director of The Wordsworth Centre at Lancaster and teaches mainly Romantic and Victorian literature. Dr Bushell has just completed a second critical book entitled Text as Process: Exploring Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Emily Dickinson currently in press with the University Press of Virginia (2008).