Emily Dickinson

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Vocation

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Family

American writer, acclaimed as the greatest woman poet of the English language. During her lifetime she had seven poems published anonymously; since her death she has been revered as a literary treasure. With poor health, shy and fastidious, she had a reclusive and uneventful life with her domineering dad, an attorney, and a mom who "did not care for thought." She was one of three children, an older brother and a younger sister who were her closest companions through her lifetime. Her parents sent her to seminary school at 17, the fall of 1847, where she was cramped, curbed and repressed into a tight Victorian mold. Becoming increasingly withdrawn and mystical, dressed always in white, she ventured outside only at dusk to water the garden. She never married and some biographers conclude that she was gay. By the early 1860s, she had created a wall of isolation around herself, which she believed critical to artistic expression. The major relationships in her life were with Susan Dickinson, her brother Austin's wife and with Bowles, a married man and the editor of the Springfield republican. She and Sue met in 1847, both 17. Through the 40 years of their correspondence, Emily never referred to her directly, but wrote in a code that included the image of a bird to indicate the object of her affections. Bowles was her closest personal friend until his death in 1873. He was vigorous, earthy and dashing. Dickinson's biographer writes that with neither relationship was physical union possible. In her last two decades, she became even more reclusive, seldom going far from her brother's house in Amherst. In 1884 her health was set back by the death of a friend and by late 1885 she was often too ill to leave her room. Stricken by Bright's disease, a type of kidney inflammation, she lost consciousness on 5/13/1886, and died 5/16/1886, 6:00 PM, in the house where she was born. After her death her sister found a manuscript of almost 900 poems, a legacy of glorious words to show the blazing wondrous genius that was hidden inside the exterior of a small brown wren. Link to Wikipedia biography