A New Dickinson Daguerreotype?

Dickinson scholar Martha Nell Smith unveiled this image at a conference in Cleveland recently.

The new daguerreotype was purchased in 1995 (by a collector who chooses to remain anonymous) from among items of an “estate cleanout” offered for sale by a Springfield, MA, junk dealer. The buyer said he had a hunch at the time he acquired it that the woman who appears left-most to the viewer might be Emily Dickinson, and pursued several lines of inquiry to prove his theory. He began his odyssey by trying to determine who the other woman might be....much more at the Emily Dickinson Museum