The Soul selects her own Society--
Then--shuts the Door--
To her divine Majority--Present no more--
Unmoved--she notes the Chariots--pausing--
At her low Gate--
Unmoved--an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat--
I've known her--from an ample nation--
Choose One--
Then--close the Valves of her attention--
Like Stone.
--Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in December 1830, into a family that had already lived in New England for eight generations. Her grandfather had founded Amherst College and her father was a successful lawyer, who would become a US Congressman and judge. From the age of eleven, Emily studied French, Latin, history, geology, botany, and philosophy at Amherst Academy, and in spite of some bouts of ill-health, graduated in 1847. She was a high-spirited and active youth, who enjoyed a reputation as the witty “Belle of Amherst”. At seventeen she left home to study at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.
Slowly however, Dickinson began to withdraw from society. At Holyoke she first refused join the Congregationalist faith and then left school after the first year. Once again at home with her parents and sister, she secretly began to write serious poems. Subsequently Emily only left Amherst for one trip, to Philadelphia and Washington where her father was a congressman, and a few doctor’s visits in Boston. In 1856 her older brother Austin married Susan Gilbert, and came to live next door. The marriage was unhappy, but Susan offered the poet support, friendship, and understanding throughout their shared lives, and it was to Susan that Emily first confided a few of her poems. Dickinson’s younger sister Lavinia also lived at home for her entire life.
In the early 1860's Dickinson withdrew even deeper into herself. She enjoyed gardening and baking, but preferred literary relationships to social intercourse--declining invitations with beautifully crafted poems. But she maintained intimate, even passionate correspondence with literary and religious figures from the outside world. Responding to an advertisement for poetry submissions she found in the Atlantic Review, Dickinson struck up a life-long correspondence with its editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who visited her twice in Amherst.
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"
--Emily Dickinson in a letter to Thomas Higginson
Emily also wrote frequently to the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she had met briefly on her trip to Philadelphia. Wadsworth, a married Calvinist clergyman, whom she called her "dearest earthly friend", had the same poise in the pulpit that Emily had in her poetry. Other correspondents were Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Republican, which had anonymously published a few of her verses; and the American novelist Helen Hunt Jackson.
Emily Dickinson died of Bright’s disease on 15 May 1886, at the age of fifty-six. Not wishing a church service, a gathering was held at her home. She was buried in Amherst’s West Cemetery in one of the white dresses she had taken to wearing in her later years, violets pinned to her collar by her sister, Lavinia. "E.D. Called Back" is inscribed on her tombstone.
After Emily’s death, Lavinia, discovered some 1,800 poems in the top drawer of her sister's dresser, and resolved to see them published. She enlisted the aid of Mable Loomis Todd, an educated and beautiful socialite, who for many years had been her brother Austin's mistress. The women contacted Emily’s corresponedent Higginson for assistance. He agreed to help, securing a publisher and heavily editing the verses he selected. He standardized Dickinson’s imaginative punctuation and capitalization and even re-worded some poems. The first volume came out in 1890 and proved so popular it was reprinted twice within two months of publication, and eventually went through 16 editions in eight years. In 1955 Emily Dickinson’s poems were finally published in their original, unedited form, displaying fully the individual genius and mystic clarity of her poetry.
William Luce writes in the preface to his play, The Belle of Amherst:
“It was my hope to depict the humanity and reasonableness of Emily Dickinson’s life. I say reasonableness, because I believe that she consciously elected to be what she was—a voluntary exile from village provincialism, an original New England romantic, concisely witty, heterodox in faith, alone but not lonely, ‘with Will to choose, or to reject.’ ‘And I choose,’ she said”
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
--Emily Dickinson
