Emily Dickinson

(1830–1886)

Afraid! Of whom am I afraid?

(first line of poem by Emily Dickinson in Poems)

The outline of Emily Dickinson’s life at first seems to be uncomplicated and relatively bare, leading to sweeping generalizations that often reduce her existence to a series of overly simplified phrases—for example, that she was a recluse, that she always wore white, that she never published her poetry during her lifetime. It is true enough to say that she was born in a house her grandfather built, that she died in that same house, and that she spent almost her entire life in the rural township of Amherst, Massachusetts. These scant facts give an impression of a staid, provincial existence secured by the successful legal practice of her father, Edward. What such a meager portrait of placid stability overlooks are the several complexities of Dickinson’s actual life—the financial turbulence that forced her family to relocate to another house in Amherst from 1840 to 1855; the social stigma Dickinson bore as a highly educated, middle-class woman who never married; her resistance to conventional religious belief; and her achievement as a pathbreaking writer who earned a reputation for original thought while rarely leaving the grounds of her family home.

Perhaps more than any other single aspect of Dickinson’s biography, her inclination to privacy, which became particularly pronounced in her thirties, has given rise to multiple misperceptions, most notably the belief that Dickinson turned to poetry as compensation for her inability to engage the larger world. What the actual details of her private life show, however, is that Dickinson’s reclusion freed her to lead an extraordinarily active mental and emotional life that included a broad knowledge of literature and current events, a voluminous correspondence, and the artistic discipline to produce and preserve nearly 1, 800 poems.

Born December 10, 1830, in the Federal-style two-story brick home known as the Homestead, Emily Elizabeth was the second of three children born to Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross. Her brother, William Austin (Austin), was born in April of the previous year, and her sister, Lavinia (Vinnie), was born in February 1833. The Homestead, located on Main Street in Amherst, was built by Edward’s father, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, in 1813. Samuel Fowler was a successful attorney and leading Amherst citizen who had joined Noah Webster in establishing the Amherst Academy in 1814 and contributed a great deal of his personal fortune to the founding of Amherst College in 1821. By the time Edward had purchased half of the Homestead from his father in April 1830 and had moved in with his young family in the months prior to Emily’s birth, Samuel Fowler was already experiencing the financial strain that would eventually lead him to sell his half of the house to General David Mack and move to Ohio in 1833. He would die in Hudson, Ohio, in April 1838, never having recovered from the losses he willingly shouldered in order to make Amherst College a center for the training of conservative Trinitarian ministers. Edward also experienced financial hardship—in his case due to the failure of investments—forcing him to sell his half of the Homestead in 1840. He moved his family to a roomy wooden house that stood in front of the town cemetery on what would later become North Pleasant Street, Amherst, until he could afford to purchase the entire Homestead from General Mack in 1855 and return there with his family. With the notable exception of trips to Washington, D.C., and Boston, Emily was to remain at the Homestead for the rest of her life.

Emily Dickinson received an excellent though uneven education, proving herself an apt student who enjoyed her teachers and her classmates. Along with Austin and Vinnie, Dickinson completed the first phase of her formal education at Amherst Academy, which her grandfather helped establish. Females were first admitted to the academy in 1838, and the course of study was demanding, though the rigor espoused in the curriculum was not uniformly enforced. During her years as a student there, from 1840 to 1847, Dickinson studied Latin, botany, geography, history, and rhetoric, in addition to attending chapel and absorbing a considerable volume of Congregationalist doctrine. In an effort to demonstrate her mastery of grammar and her maturity as a writer, Dickinson ceased to use the dash as the primary form of punctuation in her correspondence. The dash that had been so prominent in her first letters all but disappeared from 1844 to 1849, when Dickinson steadfastly employed conventional punctuation. Dickinson was very fond of her teachers and may have been seeking to please them, as well as her older brother. Dickinson stated in a letter written to her close friend Abiah Root in her last year at the Amherst Academy, “You know I am always in love with my teachers”. Abiah was but one of many close friends who made this period of Dickinson’s life particularly happy.

One incident that troubled Dickinson’s early years was her direct observation of her second cousin, Sophia Holland, who succumbed to typhus in April 1844. Dickinson was already familiar with the fact that disease was a common cause of death: According to one estimate, 22 percent of the deaths in Massachusetts in 1850 were due to tuberculosis alone, and at least 30 of Dickinson’s friends, relatives, or acquaintances perished as a result of tuberculosis. What set Sophia’s death part was their similarity in age, Dickinson’s close identification with Sophia, and her witnessing of Sophia’s declining moments. In her account of this event in a letter written two years afterward, Dickinson described Sophia as a “friend near my age & with whom my thoughts & her own were the same”. Stating that she “visited her often in sickness & watched over her bed, ” Dickinson recalled that Sophia’s “pale features lit up with an unearthly—smile” and that she herself “looked as long as friends would permit & when they told me I must look no longer I let them lead me away.” When Sophia was “laid in her coffin, ” Dickinson was overcome with “a fixed melancholy” so deep that her parents sent her away to recover at the home of her aunt Lavinia in Boston. This experience and her attendance at the funeral of Martha Dwight Strong, an acquaintance of the Dickinson family who took her own life shortly after Emily returned from Boston, may have contributed to the fascination with death and the way American culture copes with it that would later emerge in and pervade Dickinson’s poetry.

Upon completing her studies at Amherst Academy, Dickinson entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in nearby South Hadley, where she would conclude her formal education. During the year she spent at Mount Holyoke, from late September 1847 to early August 1848, Dickinson roomed with her cousin Emily Norcross. Dickinson enjoyed her studies and worked hard to excel in a curriculum heavily weighted with courses in the sciences. She also had an opportunity to think carefully about the role religious faith would play in her life. This reflection was occasioned by the wave of religious revivals known as the Second Great Awakening that surfaced at the seminary in the form of personal professions of faith. Students became identified as those who had professed faith, those who hoped to profess, and those who had no hope. Within a student population of 235, Dickinson began her year as one of 80 “no hopers”; by the end of the academic year, she would be one of 29. In January 1848 Dickinson joined 16 other students who were sufficiently concerned about their faith to seek guidance from the founder and principal, Mary Lyon. Having seriously weighed the matter and searched her soul, Dickinson decided she would not profess but rather adopt the practice of religious questioning that would become a central feature of her poetry and lead her to cease attending church. Dickinson’s departure from the seminary at the end of a single year was not unusual and did not result from her religious stance. Of the 115 students who entered with her, only 23 returned. Her father wanted her to rejoin the family, perhaps because she had been ill during the course of the year. A more likely explanation for her departure from formal education was the fact that her family had the means to support her and she did not need additional education for the purpose of earning a living.

The years immediately after Dickinson’s return to Amherst were characterized by a vibrant social life, increased dedication to literature, and the first inklings of her own identity as a writer. Benjamin Newton, a law student who worked in her father’s office from 1847 to 1849, discussed poetry with her and sent her a volume of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poems in 1850. Dickinson would later write to Thomas Wentworth Higginson that Newton was an early mentor. Also during this period Dickinson established her most enduring friendship, that with Susan Huntington Gilbert, who would marry Austin in 1856 and take up residence in the Evergreens, the home Edward built for the couple on a lot adjacent to the Homestead. Emily had known Susan at Amherst Academy, but it was during these years that they developed the intimacy that would make Susan a lifelong friend, who not only knew of Dickinson’s life as a poet but participated in that life more directly than any other person. Given these burgeoning friendships, it is no surprise that Dickinson would declare in a letter to her uncle Joel Warren Norcross in January 1850 that “Amherst is alive with fun this winter” and describe a hectic round of sleigh rides and parties.

At the same time that her social life was so sunny, however, Dickinson was experiencing another round of religious soul searching that contributed to her formulation of an independent, potentially artistic point of view. The revivals of the Second Great Awakening that had touched her time at Mount Holyoke forcefully reentered Dickinson’s Amherst life in 1850. That was the year that Lavinia, Susan, and even her father, Edward, would all profess their faith, prompting Dickinson to write in April, “Christ is calling everyone here... and I am standing alone in rebellion”. This dawning sense of isolation coincided with the 1849 return of dashes in Dickinson’s letters and her increasing immersion in literature and the life of the mind. The dash would remain a constant feature of her letters and a distinguishing characteristic of her poems. When Dickinson proclaimed to Susan that “we are the only poets” in an 1851 letter filled with literary references, she may well have been acknowledging her own literary vocation. Scholars now agree that Dickinson’s most prolific period of poetic production probably began in 1858 and continued through 1865. When Dickinson first began to write poems is unclear; she may have started as early as 1845. At that time she described herself directly as “poetical” in a letter to Abiah Root. Her earliest known poem was a Valentine greeting sent to Elbridge Bowdoin in 1850.

What is certain is that once she started, Dickinson continued to write at varying rates until her death in 1886, though never again producing poems at the levels achieved between 1858 and 1865. Precise dating of the poems is frequently impossible, as she commonly prepared as many as three rough drafts of poems, all of which she customarily destroyed, leaving only the final version. As a consequence, composition dates for most poems are best considered probable rather than certain. Even so, scholarly research suggests that during this eight-year period Dickinson completed 1, 116 of her 1, 789 poems, producing as many as 295 poems in 1863 alone.

During these years Dickinson bound most of her poems in little handmade booklets that would later be known as “fascicles. ” She made 40 of these books by copying final drafts of poems onto special paper that she purchased already folded by the manufacturer, stacking four to seven folded sheets on top of one another; punching two holes on the left, folded edge, and binding the sheets with thread. Dickinson was extraordinarily scrupulous, going about her writing mostly at night and carefully destroying early drafts so that even members of her family were unaware of her efforts at self-publication. Although her family was well aware that Dickinson wrote poems, they did not know until after her death how many she wrote or that she had produced numerous booklets containing them.

Dickinson’s family and friends knew that she wrote poetry because she sent poems in letters, openly discussed her interest in poetry, and even recited her poems in the home. That Dickinson did not seek to publish her poems is more mysterious today than it would have been in the poet’s day, when many women included poems in their correspondence without seeking publication. What would have been unusual was the sheer number of poems Dickinson sent and the correspondence she maintained with persons well positioned in the literary world. On the basis of existing letters scholars know that Dickinson sent around 500 poems through her correspondence. The actual number could be much higher, as there is no way of estimating how many poems were sent in letters subsequently lost or destroyed. This number suggests that Dickinson was dedicated to distributing her poetry to a select audience. It also indicates her wish to have a measure of control over her poems that she would not have enjoyed had she submitted them to the editorial standards of the day. Editors would almost certainly normalize Dickinson’s capitalization, “correct” her unconventional rhymes, and replace her dashes with standard forms of punctuation. We know this to be the case because these editorial norms were imposed on the 10 poems published without her permission during her lifetime. Dickinson’s desire for control may help explain why she so deliberately created and preserved her 40 fascicle books.

Of Dickinson’s nearly 100 known correspondents, three are particularly significant in terms of her life as a writer. The first of these, Higginson, was a prominent writer, Unitarian minister, political activist, and colonel in the first regiment of black soldiers to serve in the Civil War. Dickinson opened her correspondence with Higginson in April 1862, after reading his essay “A Letter to a Young Contributor, ” in the Atlantic Monthly. The essay offered practical advice to aspiring writers who were considering print publication.

Dickinson sent Higginson four poems in her first letter, apparently seeking his opinion about her poems without necessarily desiring his assistance with print publication. In a now-famous passage that appeared in her third letter to him Dickinson wrote: “I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin”. Despite differing views on publication and a great many other issues, a friendship developed, and Dickinson sustained her correspondence with Higginson for the balance of her life. Higginson visited Dickinson twice, in 1870 and 1873, and later co-edited the first posthumous volume of poems in 1890. Helen Hunt Jackson, the well-known poet and advocate of Native American rights, tried through a series of letters to convince Dickinson to publish during her lifetime, stating in an 1875 letter, “You are a great poet”. Jackson, who was born in Amherst the same year as Dickinson and also sought literary advice from Higginson, did manage to publish one Dickinson poem anonymously, “Success is counted sweetest”, in A Masque of Poets in 1878. The correspondent with whom Dickinson shared more of her thoughts about poetry than anyone else was her sister-in-law, close friend, and neighbor, Susan. Susan, who was born a mere nine days after Dickinson, received more letters than any other correspondent and is the only person known to have influenced a Dickinson poem. The letters exchanged between the two women in summer 1861 show Susan’s influence on Dickinson’s revision of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”, one of the four poems Dickinson sent Higginson in her first letter to him.

During the 1860s, Dickinson would make two trips to Boston for eye treatments, in 1864 and 1865, but wrote to Higginson in 1869, “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town”. Despite the increasing seclusion of her life, which included her ceasing to attend church around 1860, Dickinson’s life was certainly not cut off from the world. Her family subscribed to a dozen newspapers and periodicals, most of which Dickinson read avidly, and her father and brother were actively involved in public life. Her father was elected to the United States Congress in 1853 and served the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1838–39 and 1873–74. Emily and Lavinia visited him in Washington, D.C., in 1855, while he was a member of Congress. Austin was busy with his own legal career and took over for his father as treasurer for Amherst College in 1873, assuming the post Edward had held for 38 years. The family was also socially active, hosting many gatherings related to civic projects and Amherst College; Susan and Austin provided lodging for Emerson when he lectured in Amherst in 1857. It is worth noting that even during the years of greatest withdrawal Dickinson sustained her correspondence, projecting a public presence founded on a brilliant and original use of language. Mabel Loomis Todd, who moved to Amherst in 1881 and would later co-edit the first volume of Dickinson’s poems with Higginson, remarked on what she considered a striking combination of seclusion and intense contact with the world: “Emily is called in Amherst ‘the myth.’ ” Todd would write in 1882, “She writes the strangest poems, & very remarkable ones. She is in many respects a genius”.

Dickinson died in Amherst on May 15, 1886. Her death has been attributed to Bright’s disease but might easily have been the result of hypertension aggravated by recent family losses. Her father had died in Boston in 1874, her mother passed away at the Homestead in 1882, and her beloved nephew, Gilbert, died next door in 1883. These departures left Lavinia the sole female heir and therefore responsible for collecting and storing Dickinson’s possessions after her death.

While going through her sister’s belongings, Lavinia made what is perhaps the greatest discovery in American literary history: She opened the locked box that contained the poet’s handmade books of poems, the fascicles. “I found, ” Lavinia would later write, “(the week after her death) a box (locked) containing 7 hundred wonderful poems, carefully copied—”. This discovery effectively launched the public life of Dickinson. Turning first to Susan, then to Todd and Higginson, Lavinia initiated a publication history that led immediately to three editions of Dickinson’s poems in 1890, 1891, and 1896.

Since their discovery, Emily Dickinson’s poems have had a constant presence in anthologies of American literature. In fact, at times Dickinson’s writing has been the only woman’s work included in such volumes. Considered to be both of their time and ahead of it, these brief lyrics have enjoyed widespread public popularity, as well as consideration in almost any serious study of the genre or of American writing. This acclaim continues today.

As a result of complications surrounding the ownership of the manuscripts and editorial resistance to nuances of Dickinson’s handwriting, no complete edition of her poems appeared until 1955, the year the first variorum, or standard scholarly edition, was published. Ralph W. Franklin produced a groundbreaking facsimile edition of the fascicles in 1981 so that readers could see Dickinson’s own arrangement of the poems through photocopies of her handwritten fascicles. In 1998 Franklin edited the second variorum edition, demonstrating the need for an up-to-date scholarly edition that could incorporate scholarship continuously emerging in the field of Dickinson studies.