Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet.

She was born in New England into a Puritan family that had lived in Massachusetts since the 17th century. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer and politician; he served for many years in the state House of Representatives and Senate and was a U.S. congressman. Her mother was Emily Dickinson, née Norcross. Emily was the middle of three children: her brother William Austin (known as Austin) was a year older, and her sister Lavinia was three years younger. The house in Amherst where Emily Dickinson was born is now her memorial museum.

She attended elementary school on Pleasant Street in Amherst. In 1840 she began studying at Amherst Academy together with her sister; the academy had only started admitting girls two years earlier. She spent seven years at the academy, missing several semesters because of illness. She studied English, Latin, literature, history, botany, geology, psychology, and arithmetic. Many acquaintances begun at the Academy continued throughout Emily Dickinson’s life. She graduated from the academy in the summer of 1847, then studied from August 10 to March 25, 1848, at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 16 km from Amherst. The reasons for her leaving the seminary are unknown. After the seminary, she returned to her parents’ family in Amherst and lived there for the rest of her life, rarely venturing more than five miles from home.

In April 1844, Emily’s cousin Sophia Holland, with whom she was close, died of typhoid. This had a serious effect on Emily Dickinson; she became so melancholic that her parents sent her to Boston to recover. Later she showed interest in religion for a time and attended church regularly, but in 1852 she stopped, without ever making a formal profession of faith. Despite the strict Puritan morals in her family, Dickinson was acquainted with modern literature. In particular, her family friend Benjamin Franklin Newton introduced her to poetry, especially that of Wordsworth and Emerson.

In the spring of 1855, together with her mother and sister, she made one of her farthest journeys, spending three weeks in Washington, where her father represented Massachusetts in Congress, and then two weeks in Philadelphia. There she met,