BIOGARAPHY

//** Emily Elizabeth Dickinson **//

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Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst MA, to a successful family with strong community ties. She was the second child born to Emily Norcross (1804-1882) and Edward Dickinson (1803-1874), a successful lawyer who graduated from Yale, Treasurer for Amherst College and a United States Congressman. Emily had an older brother named William Austin Dickinson (1829-1895) who would marry her most intimate friend Susan Gilbert in 1856. Her younger sister’s name was Lavinia Norcross Dickinson (1833-1899). The Dickinsons were strong advocates for education and Emily also benefited from the early education in classic literature, studying the writings of Virgil and Latin, mathematics, history, and botany. She attended Mount Holyoke Female seminary in South Hadley, but severe homesick led her to return home after one year. Dickinson proved to be a bright student and in 1847, she started to write her first poems. She was in the midst of the college town’s society and bustle although she started to spend more time alone. By the 1860s, Emily lived her life in isolation from the outside world but was still actively maintaining many correspondences. She admired the poetry from Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. Emily died of Bright Disease in Amherst in 1886. After Emily’s death, her family discovered 40 hand-bound volumes of nearly 1800 of her poems or "fascicles" as they were sometimes called. These booklets were made by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems in an order that led many critics to believe to be more than chronological.

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[]; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Wed Mar 21 11:23:13 2001 Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. youtube.com
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