Emily Dickinson was born on the 10th December 1830 and died on May 15th 1886. She was born in Amherst in Massachusetts where her father was a lawyer. He dominated Emily and her sister Lavinia and ruled every part of their lives, even when they were adults he would not let them buy their own books or choose their own friends. After being taught at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a very short time in Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before going back to her family's home the homestead, and this is where she then stayed.
Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.She started writing poetry when she was 30 years old. She wrote on odd scraps of paper, which she sewed together into small books. In 1862, she sent some poems to the critic and writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but he did not understand her style, although he rather pompously encouraged her. After that, Emily would not show her work to anyone.
In 1884,Emily developed kidney trouble and become invalid. Before she died she told her sister Lavinia to destroy all her poems. Lavinia found more than 1,700 poems hidden away in trunks and drawers but could not bring herself to burn them. Instead she sent them again to Higginson who edited them with Mabel Loomis Todd a friend of Emily's. They were published in three volumes in 1955, but they were not generally liked.
It was some time before she was recognized as a poet of great intensity and originality. Dickinson's poems are very unique for the era that she wrote in as they contain short lines, typically lack titles and often utilize slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Emily Dickinson's poems are so full of awe and despair (often dealing with themes of death and immorality, two subjects that were also infused in her letters to her friends) that people have wondered whether she might have had a secret but hopeless passion for a man or woman. Some have even wondered whether it might have been Higginson himself, but there is no evidence to prove it.
