Emily Dickinson

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Standard Name: Dickinson, Emily
Birth Name: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Emily Dickinson is primarily known for her poems; she was also a letter writer. She published very little during her lifetime and the full scope of her output—some 1,775 poems—was discovered only after her death.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. Knopf, 1986.
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ED 's verse thoroughly engages with the issue of identity, how best to be.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. Knopf, 1986.
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She is held to be among the best and most original of nineteenth-century US poets.
Daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson by William C North, taken sometime between December 1846 and March 1847. She sits with her right elbow on a table beside her, which also a has a book on it. She wears her hair pulled back tight, and a dark gown with touches of white lace, and a ribbon round her neck. Amherst College.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Penelope Shuttle
At seventeen, she says (after the successive discoveries of Charlotte Brontë , T. S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson ), she began reading Rilke . Everything opened up then, a whole new world of poetry for me.
Mslexia. Mslexia Publications.
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Education Tillie Olsen
At home the Lerner children learned Yiddish songs and made up silly plays.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press, 2010.
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Tillie was a difficult child, skipping family chores to spend time at the public library, with its huge painting of...
Family and Intimate relationships Joan Aiken
JA 's father was Conrad Aiken (1889-1973), born in Savannah, Georgia: a modernist poet, critic, and editor of Emily Dickinson . He had been publishing poetry for ten years when Joan was born, and...
Friends, Associates Sylvia Townsend Warner
US poet Genevieve Taggard launched a literary friendship (and correspondence, from which Warner's surviving eighteen letters have recently been published) when she sent Warner a poem in 1941. Taggard was a poet particularly appreciated by...
Friends, Associates Julia Ward Howe
JWH first encountered Higginson (the friend and correspondent of Emily Dickinson ) at a Boston rally in support of the fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins .
Howe, Julia Ward. Reminiscences, 1819–1899. Houghton Mifflin, 1899.
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Howe was living at 241 Beacon Street in Boston...
Intertextuality and Influence Helen Oyeyemi
The collection's epigraph, open me carefully, which the publishers say was written on an envelope containing a letter from Emily Dickinson to Susan Huntington Gilbert , June 1852, emphasizes the influence of Dickinson on...
Intertextuality and Influence Helen Oyeyemi
As an avid reader, HO often cites other women writers—as well as men—as influential on her writing. She frequently cites and mentions both Louisa May Alcott 's Little Women and Emily Dickinson , of whom...
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Carson
Then after some appendices (further traces of the world of scholarship) and a poem by Emily Dickinson , Carson begins her radical modern adaptation and expansion of Geryon's story. He is now a little boy...
Intertextuality and Influence Carol Shields
Following an epigraph from Emily Dickinson , Tell all the truth but tell it slant,CS here experiments with melodrama, coincidence, and other infringements on naturalism.
Wachtel, Eleanor, editor. “Carol Shields”. More Writers and Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel, Vintage Canada, 1997, pp. 36-56.
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She also experiments with many voices, including what...
Intertextuality and Influence Adrienne Rich
First published in 1971 (Rich's collections often include writings issued previously), the essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision is described in 1988 by Elizabeth Meese as still inform[ing] much of the best work...
Intertextuality and Influence Anita Desai
AD 's work weaves together a wide range of cultural and literary references: the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgîtâ, as well as such European authors as E. M. Forster , T. S. Eliot , Dickinson
Intertextuality and Influence Anita Desai
Influenced by Eliot 's Four Quartets, Clear Light of Day deals with time as destroyer and preserver, and with what the bondage of time does to people.
Gopal, N. Raj. A Critical Study of the Novels of Anita Desai. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 1995.
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It is structured as a four...
Intertextuality and Influence Margaret Drabble
Imagery of postpartum fluidity, particularly lactation, characterizes the lovers' growing passion and the descriptions of female sexual desire and orgasm. The narrative alternates between a schizoid third-person dialogue
Drabble, Margaret. The Waterfall. Penguin, 1971.
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and first-person narration as Jane attempts...
Intertextuality and Influence Sylvia Kantaris
The poems here are full of places—real ones, like St Ives, Zennor, a rain-forest in Queensland, Australia; also the dystopias of Snapshotland (where everyone is happy all the time.)
Kantaris, Sylvia. The Sea at the Door. Secker and Warburg, 1985.
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and...
Intertextuality and Influence Penelope Shuttle
The first book that affected PS deeply was Brontë 's Jane Eyre, with whose protagonist she identified.
Steffens, Daneet. “Penelope Shuttle”. Mslexia, No. 33, pp. 46-8.
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At fifteen she read T. S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson and conceived a wish to be...

Timeline

August 1973
The National Women's Hall of Fame was inaugurated at Seneca Falls, New York, USA, site of the women's rights convention of 19 July 1848.

Texts

Dickinson, Emily, Rumer Godden, and Prudence Seward. A Letter to the World. Bodley Head, 1968.
Dickinson, Emily. “Biographical Note”. Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, edited by Thomas Johnson, Little, Brown, 1961, p. v - vi.
Dickinson, Emily. “Editorial Materials”. Open Me Carefully. Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, Paris Press, 1998, p. various pages.
Dickinson, Emily. Further Poems of Emily Dickinson withheld from publication by her sister Lavinia. Editors Bianchi, Martha Dickinson and Alfred Leete Hampson, Little, Brown, and Co., 1929.
Dickinson, Emily. Poems by Emily Dickinson. Editors Todd, Mabel Loomis and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Roberts Brothers, 1890.
Dickinson, Emily, and Martha Dickinson Bianchi. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Little, Brown, 1924.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Editor Johnson, Thomas, Faber and Faber, 1970.
Dickinson, Emily. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Editor Johnson, Thomas, Harvard University Press, 1958.
Bianchi, Martha Dickinson, and Emily Dickinson. The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. Houghton Mifflin, 1924.
Bianchi, Martha Dickinson, and Emily Dickinson. The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. Biblo and Tannen, 1971.
Dickinson, Emily. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. Editor Franklin, Ralph W., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981.
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Editor Johnson, Thomas, Belknap Press, 1955.