Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson

MARTHA DICKINSON BIANCHI(1866 – 1943) was the niece of Emily Dickinson and the only daughter of Austin and Susan Dickinson. In a life marked with tragedy, Bianchi excelled as a pianist and received her formal education at the Smith College School of Music, had a short marriage to Captain Alexander Bianchi, before finally pursuing a career as a poet and novelist in her late 30s. While she would go on to write The Cuckoo’s Nest,A Cossack Lover andThe Kiss of Apollo, Bianchi was best known for collecting and editing her aunt’s poetry, in particular, 1914’s The Single Hound, which led to a revival of interest in her aunt’s work.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson was raised in a prominent family of lawyers and politicians alongside two siblings. For seven years, she studied at Amherst Academy, excelling in English, classics, and the sciences. Dickinson suffered from melancholy and poor health from a young age, taking several breaks from school to stay with family in Boston. After graduation, Dickinson enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, withdrawing ten months later to return home to Amherst. Through her friend Benjamin Franklin Newton, she was introduced to the poetry of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose influence would prove profound as she embarked on a literary life of her own. Despite her status as one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century, Dickinson published only ten poems and one letter during her lifetime, only a sampling of nearly two thousand poems discovered after her death. Cast as an eccentric by contemporaries and later critics alike, Dickinson was an enigmatic figure whose experimental forms and extensive use of symbols have inspired generations of readers and poets. By the 1870s, following the death of her father, Dickinson had largely withdrawn from public life. Spending much of her time caring for her ailing mother, she still managed to write poems and send letters to friends and family. In 1886, following her death, Dickinson’s younger sister Lavinia discovered her collection of poems and began the long and arduous process of bringing them to print.