Emily Dickinson – 1830-1886

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Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830. Her father was a lawyer and, later, a politician. Little is known about her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson.

Emily was the middle child between an older brother and a younger sister. She had a limited formal education, as was typical for girls and young women at that time. She attended a primary school in Amherst, then spent approximately seven years at Amherst Academy “for Young Ladies”, connected with Amherst College, and, beginning at age 15, one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (A seminary could be a preparatory school or offer a college education or graduate and professional training.)

Mt. Holyoke had a strong emphasis on Christian education. The young women were divided into three categories: those who were “established Christians,” those who “expressed hope,” and those who were “without hope.” Emily placed herself in the latter category.

A variety of possible reasons are put forth for Emily’s early departure from seminary, including her “without hope” status, but none has been widely accepted by Dickinson scholars.

As an unmarried young woman, Emily returned to her family home after leaving Mount Holyoke where she (as were other similarly-situated young women) were expected to demonstrate their dutiful nature by setting aside their own interests in order to meet the needs of the home.

While daily rounds of receiving and paying visits were deemed essential to social standing of families of a certain stature in Amherst, Emily baked bread and tended the garden, but strongly resisted dusting or visiting.

In the 19th century the sister was expected to act as moral guide to her brother; Dickinson rose to that requirement—but on her own terms. Known at school as a “wit,” she put a sharp edge on her sweetest remarks. In her early letters to Austin, she represented the eldest child as the rising hope of the family. From Dickinson’s perspective, Austin’s safe passage to adulthood depended on two aspects of his character. With the first she was in firm agreement with the wisdom of the century: the young man should emerge from his education with a firm loyalty to home. The second was Dickinson’s own invention: Austin’s success depended on a ruthless intellectual honesty. If he borrowed his ideas, he failed her test of character. There were to be no pieties between them, and when she detected his own reliance on conventional wisdom, she used her language to challenge what he had left unquestioned.

In her letters to Austin in the early 1850s, while he was teaching and in the mid 1850s during his three years as a law student at Harvard, she presented herself as a keen critic, using extravagant praise to invite him to question the worth of his own perceptions. She positioned herself as a spur to his ambition, readily reminding him of her own work when she wondered about the extent of his. Dickinson’s 1850s letters to Austin are marked by an intensity that did not outlast the decade. As Austin faced his own future, most of his choices defined an increasing separation between his sister’s world and his. Initially lured by the prospect of going West, he decided to settle in Amherst, apparently at his father’s urging. Not only did he return to his hometown, but he also joined his father in his law practice. Austin Dickinson gradually took over his father’s role: He too became the citizen of Amherst, treasurer of the College, and chairman of the Cattle Show. In only one case, and an increasingly controversial one, Austin Dickinson’s decision offered Dickinson the intensity she desired. His marriage to Susan Gilbert brought a new “sister” into the family, one with whom Dickinson felt she had much in common. That Gilbert’s intensity was of a different order Dickinson would learn over time, but in the early 1850s, as her relationship with Austin was waning, her relationship with Gilbert was growing. Gilbert would figure powerfully in Dickinson’s life as a beloved comrade, critic, and alter ego.

Born just nine days after Dickinson, Susan Gilbert entered a profoundly different world from the one she would one day share with her sister-in-law. The daughter of a tavern keeper, Sue was born at the margins of Amherst society. Her father’s work defined her world as clearly as Edward Dickinson’s did that of his daughters. Had her father lived, Sue might never have moved from the world of the working class to the world of educated lawyers. Sue’s mother died in 1837; her father, in 1841. After her mother’s death, she and her sister Martha were sent to live with their aunt in Geneva, New York. They returned periodically to Amherst to visit their older married sister, Harriet Gilbert Cutler. Sue, however, returned to Amherst to live and attend school in 1847. Enrolled at Amherst Academy while Dickinson was at Mount Holyoke, Sue was gradually included in the Dickinson circle of friends by way of her sister Martha.

[Emily] defined what was incontrovertibly precious to her. Not religion, but poetry; not the vehicle reduced to its tenor, but the process of making metaphor and watching the meaning emerge. As early as 1850 her letters suggest that her mind was turning over the possibility of her own work. Extending the contrast between herself and her friends, she described but did not specify an “aim” to her life. She announced its novelty (“I have dared to do strange things—bold things”), asserted her independence (“and have asked no advice from any”), and couched it in the language of temptation (“I have heeded beautiful tempters”). She described the winter as one long dream from which she had not yet awakened. That winter began with the gift of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Poems for New Year’s.” Her letters of the period are frequent and long. Their heightened language provided working space for herself as writer. In these passionate letters to her female friends, she tried out different voices. At times she sounded like the female protagonist from a contemporary novel; at times, she was the narrator who chastises her characters for their failure to see beyond complicated circumstances. She played the wit and sounded the divine, exploring the possibility of the new converts’ religious faith only to come up short against its distinct unreality in her own experience. And finally, she confronted the difference imposed by that challenging change of state from daughter/sister to wife.

Lacking the letters written to Dickinson, readers cannot know whether the language of her friends matched her own, but the freedom with which Dickinson wrote to Humphrey and to Fowler suggests that their own responses encouraged hers. Perhaps this sense of encouragement was nowhere stronger than with Gilbert. Although little is known of their early relations, the letters written to Gilbert while she was teaching at Baltimore speak with a kind of hope for a shared perspective, if not a shared vocation. Recent critics have speculated that Gilbert, like Dickinson, thought of herself as a poet. Several of Dickinson’s letters stand behind this speculation, as does one of the few pieces of surviving correspondence with Gilbert from 1861—their discussion and disagreement over the second stanza of Dickinson’s “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.” Writing to Gilbert in 1851, Dickinson imagined that their books would one day keep company with the poets. They will not be ignominiously jumbled together with grammars and dictionaries (the fate assigned to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s in the local stationer’s). Sue and Emily, she reports, are “the only poets.”

Whatever Gilbert’s poetic aspirations were, Dickinson clearly looked to Gilbert as one of her most important readers, if not the most important. She sent Gilbert more than 270 of her poems. Gilbert may well have read most of the poems that Dickinson wrote. In many cases the poems were written for her. They functioned as letters, with perhaps an additional line of greeting or closing. Gilbert’s involvement, however, did not satisfy Dickinson. In 1850-1851 there had been some minor argument, perhaps about religion. In the mid 1850s a more serious break occurred, one that was healed, yet one that marked a change in the nature of the relationship. In a letter dated to 1854 Dickinson begins bluntly, “Sue—you can go or stay—There is but one alternative—We differ often lately, and this must be the last.” The nature of the difference remains unknown.

Dickinson’s own ambivalence toward marriage—an ambivalence so common as to be ubiquitous in the journals of young women—was clearly grounded in her perception of what the role of “wife” required. From her own housework as dutiful daughter, she had seen how secondary her own work became. In her observation of married women, her mother not excluded, she saw the failing health, the unmet demands, the absenting of self that was part of the husband-wife relationship. The “wife” poems of the 1860s reflect this ambivalence. The gold wears away; “amplitude” and “awe” are absent for the woman who meets the requirements of wife. The loss remains unspoken, but, like the irritating grain in the oyster’s shell, it leaves behind ample evidence.

Dickinson read widely among the contemporary authors on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the British were the Romantic poets, the Brontë sisters, the Brownings, and George Eliot. On the American side was the unlikely company of Longfellow, Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emerson. With a knowledge-bound sentence that suggested she knew more than she revealed, she claimed not to have read Whitman. She read Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, and Matthew Arnold. Her contemporaries gave Dickinson a kind of currency for her own writing, but commanding equal ground were the Bible and Shakespeare. While the authors were here defined by their inaccessibility, the allusions in Dickinson’s letters and poems suggest just how vividly she imagined her words in conversation with others.

The late 1850s marked the beginning of Dickinson’s greatest poetic period. By 1865 she had written nearly 1,100 poems. Bounded on one side by Austin and Susan Dickinson’s marriage and on the other by severe difficulty with her eyesight, the years between held an explosion of expression in both poems and letters. Her own stated ambitions are cryptic and contradictory. Later critics have read the epistolary comments about her own “wickedness” as a tacit acknowledgment of her poetic ambition. In contrast to joining the church, she joined the ranks of the writers, a potentially suspect group. Distrust, however, extended only to certain types. If Dickinson associated herself with the Wattses and the Cowpers, she occupied respected literary ground; if she aspired toward Pope or Shakespeare, she crossed into the ranks of the “libertine.” Dickinson’s poems themselves suggest she made no such distinctions—she blended the form of Watts with the content of Shakespeare. She described personae of her poems as disobedient children and youthful “debauchees.”

Her April 1862 letter to the well-known literary figure Thomas Wentworth Higginson certainly suggests a particular answer. Written as a response to his Atlantic Monthly article “Letter to a Young Contributor” –the lead article in the April issue—her intention seems unmistakable. She sent him four poems, one of which she had worked over several times. With this gesture she placed herself in the ranks of “young contributor,” offering him a sample of her work, hoping for its acceptance. Her accompanying letter, however, does not speak the language of publication. It decidedly asks for his estimate; yet, at the same time it couches the request in terms far different from the vocabulary of the literary marketplace:

Higginson himself was intrigued but not impressed. His first recorded comments about Dickinson’s poetry are dismissive. In a letter to Atlantic Monthly editor James T. Fields, Higginson complained about the response to his article: “I foresee that ‘Young Contributors’ will send me worse things than ever now. Two such specimens of verse as came yesterday & day before—fortunately not to be forwarded for publication!” He had received Dickinson’s poems the day before he wrote this letter. While Dickinson’s letters clearly piqued his curiosity, he did not readily envision a published poet emerging from this poetry, which he found poorly structured. As is made clear by one of Dickinson’s responses, he counseled her to work longer and harder on her poetry before she attempted its publication. Her reply, in turn, piques the later reader’s curiosity. She wrote, “I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.” What lay behind this comment? The brave cover of profound disappointment? The accurate rendering of her own ambition? Sometime in 1863 she wrote her often-quoted poem about publication with its disparaging remarks about reducing expression to a market value. At a time when slave auctions were palpably rendered for a Northern audience, she offered another example of the corrupting force of the merchant’s world. The poem begins, “Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man” and ends by returning its reader to the image of the opening: “But reduce no Human Spirit / To Disgrace of Price -.”

Her poems circulated widely among her friends, and this audience was part and parcel of women’s literary culture in the 19th century. She sent poems to nearly all her correspondents; they in turn may well have read those poems with their friends. Dickinson’s poems were rarely restricted to her eyes alone. She continued to collect her poems into distinct packets. The practice has been seen as her own trope on domestic work: she sewed the pages together. Poetry was by no means foreign to women’s daily tasks—mending, sewing, stitching together the material to clothe the person. Unremarked, however, is its other kinship. Her work was also the minister’s. Preachers stitched together the pages of their sermons, a task they apparently undertook themselves.

Emily Dickinson died in Amherst in 1886. After her death her family members found her hand-sewn books, or “fascicles.” These fascicles contained nearly 1,800 poems. Though Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson published the first selection of her poems in 1890, a complete volume did not appear until 1955. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, the poems still bore the editorial hand of Todd and Higginson. It was not until R.W. Franklin’s version of Dickinson’s poems appeared in 1998 that her order, unusual punctuation and spelling choices were completely restored.

When the first volume of Emily’s poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through 11 editions in less than two years

PG obtained this information and the quoted portions of history and commentary from The Poetry Foundation where one and all can learn much more about this extraordinary woman and also make a donation to support the Foundation’s work.