logo
livingroom

decorative bar

biographies


corner Last update of this page: June 25th 2001 corner
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
(December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886) U.S.A.

Emily

Poet

separator

fathermotherEmily was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was the middle child (a son, Austin; Emily; and another daughter, Lavinia) of a prominent lawyer and one-term United States congressional representative, Edward Dickinson, and his wife, Emily Norcross Dickinson. Her father and mother were both what we would today call "distant." Her brother, Austin, was bossy but ineffective; her sister, Lavinia, never married, and lived with Emily and was protective of the much shyer Emily.

3 kids

From 1840 to 1847 Emily attended Amherst Academy, the institution her grandfather helped found, irregularly for six years and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, a few miles from Amherst, for one year, but left because she didn't like the religious environment and because her parents asked her home. In those years she lived a normal life filled with friendships, parties, church, and housekeeping.

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. In her later years, she did not leave her home's property, living in her home and garden.

In her twenties, Emily led a busy social life, but she became more reclusive with each passing year. By her thirties, she stayed to her home and withdrew when visitors arrived. She developed a reputation as a myth, because almost never seen and, when people did catch sight of her, she was always wearing white.

EmilyEven before her withdrawal from the world she had been writing poetry, and her creative peak seems to have been reached in the period from 1858 to 1862. Although she was encouraged by the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who never comprehended her genius, and Helen Hunt Jackson, who believed she was a great poet, Dickinson published only seven poems during her lifetime. She was an intense, sensitive person who became exhausted by emotional contact with others.

But while she withdrew from physical contact with people, she did not withdraw from them mentally. Emily was an avid letter-writer who corresponded with a great number of friends and relatives. 1000 of these letters (a portion of what she wrote) survived her death, and they show her letter writing to be very similar to her poetic style - enigmatic and abstract, sometimes fragmented, and often forcefully sudden in emotion.

EmilyHer close friend, Susan Huntington, married Emily's brother Austin, and Susan and Austin Dickinson moved to a home next door. Emily and Susan exchanged ardent and passionate letters over many years; scholars are divided today on the nature of the relationship. Some say that the passionate language between women was simply an acceptable norm between friends in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; others find evidence that the Emily/Susan friendship was a lesbian relationship.

Susan and Emily probably met at Amherst. They were close friends from the beginning, sharing similar interests and desires. Emily trusted Susan completely, and was very affectionate toward Susan in all their correspondence. While Susan seems to have responded initially, Emily's attention turned cloying when Susan became engaged to Austin Dickinson, Emily's brother. For two years, their correspondence stopped completely. When Susan and Austin moved next door, their correspondence resumed again, and Emily continued her expressions of worshipful love.

Feminist scholars who have examined Emily's letters from a lesbian viewpoint note that her letters move beyond romantic friendship to the blatantly passionate. It isn't possible to know how Susan responded to Emily's proclamations of love, her desires to hold and kiss Susan, or her sorrow at being without Susan. When Emily died, all of Susan's letters were destroyed. Reading Emily's letters reveal a woman intensely dependent upon Susan's love, as this letter shows:

       It's a sorrowful morning Susie--the wind blows and it rains; "into each life some rain must fall," and I hardly know which falls fastest, the rain without, or within--Oh Susie, I would nestle close to your warm heart, and never hear the wind blow, or the storm beat, again. I sthere any room there for me, darling, and will you "love me more if ever you come home"?--it is enough, dear Susie, I know I shall be satisfied. But what can I do towards you?--dearer you cannot be, for I love you so already, that it almost breaks my heart--perhaps I can love you anew, every day of my life, every morning and evening--Oh if you will let me, how happy I shall be!

       The precious billet, Susie, I am wearing the paper out, reading it over and o'er, but the dear thoughts cant wear out if they try, Thanks to Our Father, Susie! Vinnie and I talked of you all last evening long, and went to sleep mourning for you, and pretty soon I waked up saying "Precious treasure, thou art mine," and there you were all right, my Susie, and I hardly dared to sleep lest someone steal you away. Never mind the letter, Susie; you have so much to do; just write me every week one line, and let it be, "Emily, I love you," and I will be satisfied!

       Your own Emily

The lack of biographical evidence about a lover has recently aroused suggestion that the love poems present an integral struggle with a masculine aspect of herself that seems to be the link with and the key to her sexual nature, spiritual identity, and creative imagination. Some of her poems exist in two versions - with alternate sets of pronouns. Lillian Faderman recently showed that Dickinson's passionate letters to her friend Susan Gilbert were heavily edited by Dickinson's niece in order to muffle to deep professions of love they offered. Does this make her a lesbian? One can certainly read much of her work from a lesbian-feminist slant, according to Toni McNaron, without turning her into a practicing lesbian.

Though it may be anachronistic to call Dickinson a lesbian, the fact remains that Gilbert played a major role in her life and art - arguably a much larger role than any of Dickinson's male friends and admirers.

letter

Most of the poems we have were written in just six years, between 1858 and 1864. She bound them into small volumes she called fascicles, and forty of these were found in her room at her death, on May 15, 1886.

Dickinson's posthumous fame began when Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson edited and published two volumes of poems (1890, 1891) and some of her correspondence (2 vol., 1894). Other editions of verse followed, many of which were marred by unskillful and unnecessary editing.

A definitive edition of her works did not appear until the 1950s, when T. H. Johnson published her poems (3 vol., 1955) and letters (3 vol., 1958); only then was a serious study of her work possible.

separator

To read some of Dickinson poems, go to our "Homoerotic Poems" book.

NEXT
Click on the letter D to go back to the list of names

corner © Matt & Andrej Koymasky, 1997 - 2008 corner