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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