Emily Dickinson
...She was also considered to be an obsessively private writer. With close to two thousand different poems and one thousand of her letters to her friends that survived her death Emily Dickinson showed that she was a truly dedicated writer. Out of her two thousand poems only seven were published during her lifetime. (1)
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in the quiet community of Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830 to a prominent family, her father Edward Dickinson, an orthodox Calvinist, was both a lawyer and the Treasurer of Amherst College. He also served in Congress. Emily's mother was Emily Norcross Dickinson. Throughout Emily's life, her mother was not "emotionally accessible," the absence of which might have caused some of Emily's eccentricity. Her family was known for educational and political activity. The family included three children, an older brother, William Austin and a little sister, Lavinia. Being rooted in the puritanical Massachusetts of the 1800's, the Dickinson children were raised in the Christian tradition, and they were expected to take up their father's religious beliefs and values without argument. Emily was born in, and died in, a house called the Homestead, built by her grandfather Samuel Fowler Dickinson in 1813. This house was sold out of the family, however, in 1833, and not re-purchased by Edward Dickinson till 1855; so most of the poet's younger years were lived in other houses. (5)
Emily was educated at the Amherst Academy, the institute that her grandfather helped found. She continued education there from 1834-1847. She also spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but had left because she did not like the religious environment. During the 1847-1848 year at the Seminary she studied under Mary Lyons. Dickinson acquired limited notoriety as the one student unwilling to publicly confess...
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