Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family; her father was a lawyer, treasurer of Amherst College and a member of Congress. She attended Amherst Academy and spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She never married and, from her thirties, rarely left her family's house, the Homestead, where she gardened, baked and wrote letters to a circle of friends. She wrote nearly 1,800 poems, most of them short, using dashes, slant rhymes and unusual capital letters, and often writing about death, nature, faith and the inner life. She sent some poems to the editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who corresponded with her for years, but only about ten were published in her lifetime, usually without her name and with changes. After her death in Amherst in 1886, her sister Lavinia found her poems, many in small hand-sewn booklets, and the first collection was published in 1890. Later editions restored her original wording and punctuation.

Emily Dickinson is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Raised in a Calvinist family that practiced daily religious observances; she did not make a public confession of faith during the 1845 Amherst revival. Source: Wikipedia