Emily Dickinson

Her grandfather Samuel helped found Amherst College and in 1813 built the Homestead, the house that held the family for most of a century. Her father, Edward, practiced law there, kept the college's books from 1835 to 1873, and served a term in Congress. She wrote about him warmly and about her mother otherwise — an awful mother, she said, but she liked her better than none. Seven years at Amherst Academy gave her Latin, botany, geology and mental philosophy. A revival swept the town in 1845 and produced 46 confessions of faith among her friends, and hers was not one of them. She lasted ten months at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and in March 1848 her brother Austin came to bring her home at all events.

Ten poems and one letter reached print while she was alive, most of them in Samuel Bowles's Springfield Republican, unsigned and retitled by other hands: The Snake, The Sleeping, Sunset. Helen Hunt Jackson talked her into one more, anonymous, for the collection A Masque of Poets. Everything else went out by post — verses folded into letters, or tied to bunches of flowers for neighbors who valued the flowers more. BriefHistory takes up the poems and what they did to American writing. This page is about the house they were written in.

Carlo, the dog who kept her company for 16 years, died in 1866, and she never took another. The 1880s took nearly everyone else. In 1882 her brother Austin fell in love with Mabel Loomis Todd, an Amherst faculty wife who never met Emily and called her the Myth, and Austin's wife Susan — the correspondent scholars now read as the central attachment of Dickinson's life — sickened with grief while the affair ran on across the lawn. Charles Wadsworth died that April, her mother that November. Austin's youngest child, Gilbert, her favorite, died of typhoid the next year, and Judge Otis Lord in 1884. That summer she fainted while baking and stayed unconscious into the night. Her physician gave the cause of death as Bright's disease and its duration as two and a half years.

Lavinia kept the promise and burned most of the letters. Emily had left no instruction about the 40 notebooks and loose sheets in a locked chest, so those survived, and the household split over them. Austin's daughter Martha edited from the family's manuscripts, Todd's daughter Millicent from her mother's, and the feud put two incompatible Dickinsons in print for three decades. Thomas Johnson's 1955 variorum finally gathered the poems as she left them, untitled and numbered. In 1981 Ralph Franklin rebuilt her hand-sewn packets from smudge marks and needle holes. Amherst College bought the Homestead in 1965 and took the Evergreens in 2003. The two houses are one museum now.

Emily Dickinson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The herbarium other
  424 pressed specimens on 66 pages, made at Amherst Academy and now at Harvard —
• The fascicles other
  Forty hand-sewn packets and loose sheets, left in a locked chest —
• A Narrow Fellow in the Grass other
  Printed in the Springfield Republican as "The Snake" —
• Success is counted sweetest other
  Her only appearance in a book while alive, unsigned, in A Masque of Poets —
• Poems by Emily Dickinson book
  The first posthumous volume, 115 poems, 11 printings in two years 1890

• September 7, 1840 aged 9 Starts at Amherst Academy with her sister Lavinia The school had admitted girls only two years earlier.
• 1845 aged ~15 A revival produces 46 confessions of faith among her peers, and none from her She stopped attending church about 1852 and kept the Sabbath at home.
• March 25, 1848 aged 17 Austin arrives at Mount Holyoke to bring her home at all events Accounts of why she left after ten months do not agree.
• April 1862 aged 31 Writes to Thomas Wentworth Higginson to ask if her verse is alive She enclosed four poems and her name on a separate card.
• 1867 aged ~37 Begins talking to callers through a closed door By her last 15 years, few of the neighbors she wrote to had seen her.
• 1883 aged ~53 Gilbert, her brother's youngest child and her favorite, dies of typhoid
• May 15, 1886 aged 55 Dies at the Homestead at 55 Her last letter read, in full: Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily.
• November 1890 aged 59 The first volume of Poems appears, edited by Todd and Higginson It went through 11 printings in two years.
• 1955 Thomas Johnson's variorum prints the poems as she left them

• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
  Essayist and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement and shaped American intellectual thought. read and quoted
• Walt Whitman 1819–1892
  Poet whose Leaves of Grass celebrated democracy, nature, and the human body in free verse. the other pole of American poetry
• Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804–1864
  Novelist whose The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables explored Puritan guilt and sin. neighbor in Amherst's literary orbit
• Sylvia Plath 1932–1963
  Poet and novelist whose confessional works, including The Bell Jar, broke new ground for women's writing. influenced
• Robert Frost 1874–1963
  Four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose rural New England verse became synonymous with American poetry. influenced
• Louisa May Alcott 1832–1888
  Author of Little Women and a founding figure of American domestic fiction. contemporary who wrote for the public