Dickinson.

1855 Dickinson makes a brief trip with her sister and father to Philadelphia; she meets the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who becomes a close friend and correspondent. Edward Dickinson repurchases the Homestead ; he builds an addition to the house, including a conservatory for Emily’s exotic plants.

1856 Austin Dickinson and Susan Gilbert marry; they move into the Evergreens, a house adjacent to the Homestead built for them by Edward as a wedding present.

1858 At the Evergreens, Dickinson meets the literary editor and critic Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican ; they begin a correspondence.

1861 The Civil War breaks out.

1855 Dickinson sends four of her poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He advises her to regularize the “rough rhythms” and “imperfect rhymes” of her poetry, which he thinks damage its commercial potential. She instead chooses not to publish her works. Dickinson and Higginson begin a correspondence that lasts twenty years.

1864 Dickinson makes two trips to Boston over the next two years to visit an eye specialist. These are the last times she leaves Amherst.

1874 Dickinson’s father dies in Boston on June 16. With his death, Dickinson becomes more reclusive, keeping contact with friends and family mainly through letters. She and Lavinia maintain the Homestead and nurse their invalid mother.

1878 Samuel Bowles dies on January 16.

1882 Charles Wadsworth dies on April 1; Dickinson’s mother also dies this year, on November 14.

1883 Dickinson’s nephew Gilbert, the son of Austin and Susan Gilbert, dies.

1884 On June 14 Dickinson suffers her first attack of Bright’s disease, a serious kidney disorder.

1886 Dickinson dies on May 15. Among those attending her funeral is her lifelong friend and mentor Thomas Higginson.

1890 Lavinia finds Dickinson’s poems, untitled and bundled into fascicles (sewn paper booklets). She gives them to Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, another friend of Dickinson‘s, for editing. The first of three volumes titled Poems is published (the other two are published in 1891 and 1896). The manuscripts are then kept in storage for the next sixty years.

1894 Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Todd, is published.

1899 Lavinia dies in 1899.

1914 An edition of Dickinson’s poetry—The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime—edited by her niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi is published.

1955 Thomas H. Johnson rediscovers Dickinson’s original poems; he publishes The Poems of Emily Dickinson, the first complete collection of her poetry that is free from editorial revisions. The book’s publication leads to a renewed interest in Dickinson’s poetry.

1963 The Homestead is designated a National Historic Landmark.

1965 Amherst College purchases the Homestead and opens the house as the Emily Dickinson Museum.

1977 The State of Massachusetts establishes the Emily Dickinson Historic District, which includes the Homestead, the Evergreens, and surrounding properties.

INTRODUCTION

Emily Dickinson, writing to the editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson in July 1862, reported that she “had no portrait,” but offered the following description in place of one: “Small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur—and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves—Would this do just as well?” (Selected Letters, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, p. 175; see “For Further Reading”). Despite Dickinson’s claim, we do possess one photograph of her—a daguerreotype taken in 1847 or 1848, when she was in her late teens. The image certainly confirms her self-portrait: Her frame is tiny; her shiny hair does indeed sit boldly atop her head; and her dark eyes really do glisten like liquor at the bottom of a glass.

The photograph also suggests many of the rich puzzles and paradoxes that have informed our view of Dickinson since the last decade of the nineteenth century, when readers and critics began to read, study, and obsess over her poems. Dickinson’s body, with its delicate hands and slender torso, may resemble the fragile form of someone too weak to venture far from home; but her huge moist eyes stare at us with the wisdom, depth, and longing of a woman who has traveled around the world and come back with stories, not all of them fit for mixed company. She demurely clutches a bouquet of flowers, and a book rests primly at her side; but her full, sensuous lips reveal a person whose thoughts may not always tend toward such tidy subjects as flowers and books. We look away from the photograph intrigued and stirred: What’s going on in her mind? How could this slight figure be the author of some of the most passionate love poems, the most searing descriptions of loss, the most haunting religious lyrics