The Life of Emily Dickinson

The Life of Emily Dickinson
Author: Richard Benson Sewall
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 932
Release: 1994
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674530805

A massively detailed, illustrated biography of Emily Dickinson.

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books
Author: Alfred Habegger
Publisher: Modern Library
Total Pages: 802
Release: 2002-09-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0812966015

Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography, Alfred Habegger presents the first thorough account of Dickinson’s growth–a richly contextualized story of genius in the process of formation and then in the act of overwhelming production. Building on the work of former and contemporary scholars, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books brings to light a wide range of new material from legal archives, congregational records, contemporary women's writing, and previously unpublished fragments of Dickinson’s own letters. Habegger discovers the best available answers to the pressing questions about the poet: Was she lesbian? Who was the person she evidently loved? Why did she refuse to publish and why was this refusal so integral an aspect of her work? Habegger also illuminates many of the essential connection sin Dickinson’s story: between the decay of doctrinal Protestantism and the emergence of her riddling lyric vision; between her father’s political isolation after the Whig Party’s collapse and her private poetic vocation; between her frustrated quest for human intimacy and the tuning of her uniquely seductive voice. The definitive treatment of Dickinson’s life and times, and of her poetic development, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books shows how she could be both a woman of her era and a timeless creator. Although many aspects of her life and work will always elude scrutiny, her living, changing profile at least comes into focus in this meticulous and magisterial biography.

The Life of Emily Dickinson

The Life of Emily Dickinson
Author: Richard Benson Sewall
Publisher:
Total Pages: 821
Release: 1974
Genre: Poets, American
ISBN: 9780374186968

Book Description: The life of Emily Dickinson, Richard B. Sewall's monumental biography of the great American poet (1830-1886), won the National Book award. It has been called "by far the best and most complete study of the poet's life yet to be written, the result of nearly twenty years of work" (The Atlantic).

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel
Author: Jerome Charyn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2011-02-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 039307725X

"In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet and her great leaps of the imagination." —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review) Jerome Charyn, "one of the most important writers in American literature" (Michael Chabon), continues his exploration of American history through fiction with The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, hailed by prize-winning literary historian Brenda Wineapple as a "breathtaking high-wire act of ventriloquism." Channeling the devilish rhythms and ghosts of a seemingly buried literary past, Charyn removes the mysterious veils that have long enshrouded Dickinson, revealing her passions, inner turmoil, and powerful sexuality. The novel, daringly written in first person, begins in the snow. It's 1848, and Emily is a student at Mount Holyoke, with its mournful headmistress and strict, strict rules. Inspired by her letters and poetry, Charyn goes on to capture the occasionally comic, always fevered, ultimately tragic story of her life-from defiant Holyoke seminarian to dying recluse.

My Emily Dickinson

My Emily Dickinson
Author: Susan Howe
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2007-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0811223345

"Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops."—The New York Sun For Wallace Stevens, "Poetry is the scholar's art." Susan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun," Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. "Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text...."

Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief

Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief
Author: Roger Lundin
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2004-02-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780802821270

Paying special attention to her experience of faith, Lundin relates Dickinson's life -- as it can be charted through her poems and letters -- to nineteenth-century American political, social, religious, and intellectual history. --From publisher description.

Becoming Emily

Becoming Emily
Author: Krystyna Poray Goddu
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2019-02-01
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0914091190

Emily Dickinson wrote short, often enigmatic poems that are widely read and quoted by people of every age. Yet, as well known as her poetry is, Dickinson as a person is considered to have been a mysterious recluse—a silent figure who wore only white, wrote in secret, never left her home, and had no interest in sharing her poetry. In Becoming Emily, young readers will learn how as a child, an adolescent, and well into adulthood, Dickinson was a lively social being with a warm family life. Highly educated for a girl of her era, she actively engaged in both the academic and social aspects of the schools she attended until she was nearly eighteen. Her family and friends were important to her, and she was a prolific, thoughtful, and witty correspondent who shared many poems with her closest friends and relatives. This indispensable resource includes photos, full-length poems, letter excerpts, a time line, source notes, and a bibliography to present a vivid portrait of this singular American poet.