Letters

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) spent almost all her life in her family's house in Amherst, Massachusetts. After a year at a women's seminary she withdrew more and more from society, dressing in white and receiving few visitors, though she kept up a lively correspondence with friends and with the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

She wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems, sewing many into small handmade booklets, and published only a handful. Her sister discovered them after her death, and a complete edition faithful to her dashes and capital letters appeared only in 1955. Her Poems made her one of the greatest poets in English.