Emily Dickinson : a literary life / by Linda Wagner-Martin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wagner-Martin, Linda, author.

Series:

Literary lives.

Literary lives

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886.

Dickinson, Emily.

Women poets, American--19th century--Biography.

Women poets, American.

Poets, American--19th century--Biography.

Poets, American.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

x, 202 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Summary:

This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the most admired and influential English-language authors. Volumes follow the outline of writers' working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing, and social contexts which shaped their writing. 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 live 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Reaching 1850 1

2 Dickinson's Search, to Find the Poem of Her Being 13

3 Losses into Art 24

4 Dickinson's Expanding Readership 36

5 Dickinson and War 45

6 Colonel Higginson as Mentor 54

7 Life Without Home, For the Last Time 65

8 Dickinson's Fascicles, Beginnings and Endings 77

9 The Painful Interim 83

10 To Define "Belief" 92

11 1865, The Late Miracle 103

12 Maintaining Urgency 110

13 Colonel Higginson, Appearing 121

14 1870-1873 130

15 The Beginning of the Calendar of Deaths 136

16 Surviving Death 145

17 "Mother's Hopeless Illness" 151

18 Courtships 159

19 "The Poets Light but Lamps" 166

20 The Loving Dickinson 174.

ISBN:

9781137033055

1137033053

OCLC:

865161204