II.

Life

Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was the middle child of a prominent lawyer and one-term United States congressional representative, Edward Dickinson, and his wife, Emily Norcross Dickinson. From 1840 to 1847 she attended the Amherst Academy, and from 1847 to 1848 she studied at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, a few miles from Amherst. With the exception of a trip to Washington, D.C., in the late 1850s and a few trips to Boston for eye treatments in the early 1860s, Dickinson remained in Amherst, living in the same house on Main Street from 1855 until her death. During her lifetime, she published only about 10 of her nearly 2,000 poems, in newspapers, Civil War journals, and a poetry anthology. The first volume of Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, was published in 1890, after Dickinson’s death.

The notion that Dickinson was extremely reclusive is a popular one, but it is at best a partial truth. Dickinson’s first editors molded their descriptions of her and her work to conform to 19th-century stereotypes of women writers and to downplay qualities that did not match the conventional conception. Popular depictions of Dickinson, as in the play The Belle of Amherst (1976), have perpetuated a belief that she always dressed in white, was sensitive and reclusive in nature, and had an unrequited or secret love. Although she never married and certainly became more selective over the years about the company she kept, Dickinson was far more sociable than most descriptions would have us believe. She frequently entertained guests at her home and at the home of her brother and sister-in-law during her 20s and 30s; one friend commented that Dickinson was so surrounded by friends at a party that she had no chance to talk with her. In addition, Dickinson kept up a voluminous correspondence with friends, family, and one of her spiritual mentors, minister Charles Wadsworth. Although it has long been believed that various correspondents, including Higginson and editor Samuel Bowles, served as literary guides, there is no evidence that they influenced her writing.

Biographers are increasingly recognizing the vital role of Dickinson’s sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, in her writing. For more than 35 years the two women lived next door to each other, sharing mutual passions for literature, music, cooking, and gardening. Emily sent Susan more than 400 poems and letter-poems, twice as many as she sent to any other correspondent. Susan also is the only person at whose behest Dickinson actually changed a poem; in response to Susan’s criticism, Dickinson wrote four different second stanzas to “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.” Evidence has also surfaced that Susan participated in the writing of many poems with Emily, and Susan was probably responsible for the few printings Emily Dickinson saw of her poems during her lifetime. In 1998 Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson was published, documenting the two women’s friendship.