Nareon's dedications and epigraphs are brief and reticent. Their biographical interpretation remains contested: a line before a novel does not necessarily identify its addressee, and a borrowed quotation speaks more to the author's reading than to a definitive explanation of the plot.
The First Novel's Dedication
The first printing of The House of the Inner Wind (1989) bears the unexpanded dedication “For E., who kept the door open.” No name accompanies it. Later cataloguers sometimes associated E. with a family member or a person from Nareon's years of archival work; neither claim rests on a surviving attribution. Miriam Kell's editorial correspondence does not establish that she was the dedicatee. A marginal note in a publisher's copy, not every open door is an invitation, was circulated later as though it explained the dedication, but its hand is unidentified. This uncertainty is part of the novel's reception, not a puzzle conclusively solved by the plot.
The Epigraph and the Reading Shelf
The 1989 novel opens with a brief quotation from Emily Dickinson's “I dwell in Possibility —”, using the opening line alone; the image of a House in the poem is pointed, but the novel never turns the epigraph into a direct allegory. Nareon's recurring literary touchstones in editors' notes and subsequent editions form a small, consistent shelf: Emily Dickinson (doors, chosen company, inward freedom), George Herbert (rooms, thresholds, light and duty), John Donne (relation, conscience, obligation), Emily Brontë (weather, dwelling and solitude), and Henry David Thoreau (the distinction between inhabiting a place and owning it). All predate the 1989 first edition. The list is a guide to the author's aesthetic, not a claim that every writer is quoted in the first novel. Source for the Dickinson line: Poetry Foundation; for Herbert's The Windows: Poetry Foundation.
Editorial History and Attribution
The first printing (1989) places Dickinson's opening line before the novel, followed by five brief, separately attributed epigraphs at the beginnings of its parts: Thoreau, Walden (“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”); Herbert, “The Windows” (“He is a brittle, crazy glass”); Dickinson, “I dwell in Possibility —” (“More numerous of Windows —”); Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII (“No man is an island, entire of itself;”); and Emily Brontë, “No Coward Soul Is Mine” (“No coward soul is mine”). Their arrangement traces passage from the city, through fragile domestic life and recognition, to social obligation and refusal. The pre-1989 texts were available to Nareon. Later quotation sheets sometimes expanded the extracts or silently modernized spellings; such variants must not be mistaken for the printed readings. The source texts can be checked in editions of Thoreau, Herbert, Dickinson, Donne, and Brontë.
The Second Novel's Epigraph
The 1991 first printing of Plaice at the Seventh Opening has no dedication. It opens instead with a single line from Emily Dickinson: “The Soul selects her own Society —”. As with the first novel, Nareon uses only the opening line, without turning the poem into a key for decoding the plot.
The choice is usually read against the novel’s central distinction between the House’s recognition and Plitsa’s own consent: being chosen by a House does not settle whom she chooses to belong with. The source text is Dickinson’s “The Soul selects her own Society —”.