Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she spent almost her entire life. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a well-known lawyer and politician, and their family home — a large brick house called the Homestead — became both a source of comfort and a confining space for her.
She attended Amherst Academy and later Mount Holyoke Female Seminary but left after less than a year. The reasons for her departure remain unclear. However, by her late twenties, Dickinson had begun to withdraw from public life in a way that was quite unusual for her time. She seldom left the house, mostly communicated with friends and acquaintances through letters, and wore white almost exclusively. Whether this behavior stemmed from illness, heartbreak, social anxiety, or simply a strong desire to protect her inner world is uncertain.
“What she did in that house, however, was write.”
A lot. She produced nearly 1,800 poems, many of which she bound into small hand-sewn booklets called fascicles. She shared some of her poems in letters, and a few were published during her lifetime — usually anonymously, with her punctuation and capitalization "corrected" by editors who struggled to understand her style. She didn't contest this. In fact, she seemed indifferent to publication altogether.
After her death in 1886, her sister Lavinia uncovered the extent of Emily's work and worked to have it published. The first collection was released in 1890. Readers quickly became captivated by her poems, although it took many years before editors stopped altering her unconventional dashes and slant rhymes to present the poems as she originally wrote them.
