Emily Dickinson A Literary Life

by Wagner-Martin, Linda

• ISBN13: 9781137543691
• ISBN10: 1137543698
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-08-03
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Now published in paperback for the first time, this literary biography study offers a comprehensive account of Emily Dickinson's life, as a poet as well as a daughter of a prominent Amherst, Massachusetts, family. For many years accompanied by her large dog, she well knew the worlds of nature and natural beauties. For many more years, she chronicled her life - especially her life of the imagination - in hundreds of letters, as well as the nearly 1,800 poems that have been found. Such rich material informs this book's narrative, building a picture of a woman loyal to her parents and her myriad of friends, as well as siblings, niece and nephews, and her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her constant muse. Never content with passive acceptance, or a life that conformed to the dutiful unmarried daughter's role, Dickinson the poet worked all her mature life to bring her art to its consistently firm - and always brilliant - greatness.

Author Biography

Linda Wagner-Martin has published nearly sixty books about American letters; she recently was awarded the Hubbell Medal for a lifetime of work in American literature. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Bunting Institute fellow, the recipient of a senior National Endowment for the Humanities and many other grants, including residencies at Bogliasco and Bellagio. The recipient of many teaching and mentoring awards at both University of North Carolina and Michigan State University, she has worked extensively to make American literature a broadly based field for scholarly exploration. She has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States as well as its anthology, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, and textbooks on both poetry and women's literature.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
1. Reaching 1850
2. Dickinson's Search, to Find the Poem of Her Being
3. Losses into Art
4. Dickinson's Expanding Readership
5. Dickinson and War
6. Colonel Higginson as Mentor
7. Life Without Home, For the Last Time
8. Dickinson's Fascicles, Beginning and Endings
9. The Painful Interim
10. To Define Belief
11. 1865, The Late Miracle
12. Maintaining Urgency
13. Colonel Higginson, Appearing
14. 1870-1873
15. The Beginning of the Calendar of Deaths
16. Surviving Death
17. 'Mother's Hopeless Illness'
18. Courtships
19. 'The Poets light but Lamps'
20. The Loving Dickinson
Bibliography
Index