Dickinson was 16 years old when she enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which was ten miles from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. The Seminary hoped that its students would become missionaries. Dickinson dropped out less than a year after she enrolled. She refused, as the Norton Anthology puts it, "to capitulate to the demands of orthodoxy."
The Homestead
After leaving Mount Holyoke, Dickinson returned to the home she grew up in with her older brother and younger sister. She lived there, in her parents' home, for the rest of her life. She called it a place of "Infinite power" (1247).
Magnum Bonum
Dickinson's first publication, a letter prefaced by a short poem ("Magnum bonum, harem scarem") appeared anonymously in the Amherst College version of ECU's Originals in 1850. Critics believe the letter was intended for the editor of the journal.
Susan
Some critics believe Emily had a long-term romantic relationship with Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, her older brother's wife.
A Prominent Family
Dickinson's father served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1853-54), state senator, helped found Amhert College "as a Calvinist alternative to the more liberal Harvard and Yale," and served as the Amherst College treasurer for 36 years (1247).
The Civil War
Dickinson wrote half of the poems we have today during the Civil War (1248).
Publication
Today over 1800 of Dickinson's poems survive. Only a dozen of them appeared during her liftetime. Her first editors "saw her formal innovations as imperfections," but Dickison "was unwilling to submit" to the changes they recommended, which she described as "surgery" (1249).
Many of her poems were published for the first time in 1890, ten years after Dickinson's death. Their republication in 1914 helped keep her work from falling out of favor (1250).
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