Massachusetts, to Emily Norcross Dickinson
and Edward Dickinson. The poet was one of
three children: William Austin (1829–1895),
called Austin, was her older brother; Lavinia
Norcross (1833–1899), called Lavinia or Vinnie,
her younger sister. The Dickinsons were a well-
established and respected family, descended
from Puritans who arrived in North America in
the seventeenth century and from Dickinsons
who had lived in Amherst since 1742. The
poet’s paternal grandfather Samuel Dickinson
(1775–1838) was one of the founders of Amherst
College, and it was he who built the brick colo-
nial on Main Street, later called the Dickinson
Homestead, where the poet was born. His eldest
son, Edward, the poet’s father, was a lawyer and
conservative Whig who served as college treas-
urer for four decades and served two terms in the
Massachusetts House of Representatives, one
term as state senator, and one term as a con-
gressman in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In Amherst, he was respectfully referred to as
Squire Dickinson. William Austin, the poet’s
brother, became a lawyer also and practiced
law with his father. Emily Dickinson was born
into a family whose male members were worldly
and dominant and whose house was the center of
Amherst society.
Dickinson attended Amherst Academy for
seven years and completed one year at Mount
Holyoke Female Seminary (1847–1848), where
she made a reputation not as a keen student but
as being unwilling to convert to a Christian faith.
During the popular religious revivals of the
1840s and in 1850 when family members and
friends joined the First Church of Christ, Dick-
inson firmly resisted the pressure to profess the
faith and join the church. She began writing
poetry in earnest about 1850 and became grad-
ually more reclusive. By the age of thirty, the
poet had stopped attending church and avoided
other social gatherings. She had a lively social
life, nonetheless, in the small circle of family,
relatives, and few friends, and she enjoyed an
active correspondence. Though she mainly
stayed in her home and in Amherst, Dickinson
made a few trips to other cities, visiting Boston
and Springfield, Massachusetts, and Washing-
ton, D.C. The period of her greatest productivity
is estimated to have extended from about 1858 to
about 1864. During these years, she made fair
copies of about 1,100 poems and gathered 833 of
them into hand-sewn booklets. Also during this
period, Dickinson contacted Thomas Went-
worth Higginson about the worth of a few of
her poems and thus initiated their acquaintance
and correspondence. During her lifetime, fewer
than ten poems were published.
Beyond her private life as a poet, Dickinson
devoted herself to her family and enjoyed the
company of extended family members, espe-
cially her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson,
Austin’s wife, who lived next door in the Ever-
greens, the home Edward Dickinson built for his
son and daughter-in-law as a gift. The poet took
part in various housekeeping activities, was
known for baking excellent bread, and was an
avid gardener, both in the conservatory attached
to the house and on the Homestead property.
Dickinson was also involved with her sister in
caring for their mother who was bedridden from
1875 until her death in 1882. In 1884, Dickinson
experienced the first attack of some illness, gen-
erally identified as kidney disease, and she died
two and a half years later on May 15, 1886, at the
age of fifty-five. The attending physician said the
cause of death was Bright’s disease. Subse-
quently, some have questioned that diagnosis,
and Alfred Habegger, in his biography of the
poet, makes an argument against it and suggests
the cause may have been hypertension.Emily Dickinson(The Library of Congress)
I’m Nobody! Who are you?