Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
4
ED
's verse thoroughly engages with the issue of identity, how best to be.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. Knopf.
9
She is held to be among the best and most original of nineteenth-century US poets.
Despite the slightness of her oeuvre and Wuthering Heights's initial lack of popularity, EB
emerged early as a major influence on other writers. Matthew Arnold
paid early tribute by comparing her to Byron
in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Helen Oyeyemi
HO
identifies more as a reader than as a writer: she cites, alludes to, and rewrites a large number and variety of authors: Emily Dickinson
, Nella Larsen
, Louisa May Alcott
, and Simi Bedford
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
American poet Emily Dickinson
loved EBB
's poetry. The language of Aurora Leigh crops up throughout her oeuvre, and she recalls the transformative experience, sanctifying the soul, of her early reading in one poem: I...
Intertextuality and Influence
Helen Oyeyemi
The novel is written from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl, Jessamy (Jess) Harrison (also called Wuraola in Nigeria), the only child of a Nigerian mother and a British father. The book chronicles Jess's loneliness...
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
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
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...
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.
165
Howe was living at 241 Beacon Street in Boston...
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...
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...
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.
47
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.
27
Tillie was a difficult child, skipping family chores to spend time at the public library, with its huge painting of...
