Short Biography of Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

•   Born in Amherst, Massachusetts 1830, Died 1886

•   Grandfather was the founder of Amherst College

•  Father- Edward Dickinson was a lawyer and the treasurer of Amherst College

•   Mother- Emily Norcross Dickinson was a recluse and showed little interest in being a mother

•    Schooling: attended Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (Now Mount  Holyoke College, in South Hadley)

•   After that, apart from visits to Washington and Philadelphia to see her father while he was in congress in 1854 and a trip to Boston for an eye exam, she did not leave Amherst. She was believed to be 36 when she made this decision, making the stay within her home and surrounding neighborhood over twenty years long.

•   Even  at the age twelve Emily was an excellent letter writer

•  Wrote on scraps of paper, envelopes, sewn into booklets

• Began writing for publication in 1860s but after a cruel critique by Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862, she kept her work to herself and close friends

• Two poems published in her lifetime, without her permission

•   Invalid 2 years before her death from Brights disease

•  Asked for her manuscripts to be destroyed

•   Her sister Lavinia found her poems in a truck/drawer (different sources)

•   The poems were bound like a book (roughly 1700 poems)

• Lavinia consulted Susan Gilbert Dickinson about publication *some poems were thought to be love poems to her

• She kept them for two years, then Lavinia got them back and took them to Higginson and Mable Loomis Todd to have them published

• After Susan’s death, the letters and poems she received from Dickinson personally, were published by Susan’s daughter Martha Dickinson Bianchi

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