Debunking the myth of Dickinson's antisocial seclusion

Breaking down how Dickinson viewed letters as an extension of her poetry

The poet's many correspondences were dashed with playful arrangements of text, offering her pen pals surprises once they opened their envelopes. Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith explain how Dickinson even creatively used the 19th-century security technique of letterlocking in poetic ways.

A comprehensive biography of Emily Dickinson, the influential American poet

This deep dive into Dickinson's biography includes a fascinating anecdote about her time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary—where she was distinguished from the "established Christians" and deemed "without hope"—as well as the significance of her correspondence with close friend Susan Gilbert, one of her primary readers and eventual sister-in-law.

How Dickinson's reputation changed in the 20th century

In 1955, Thomas Johnson edited the first complete edition of Dickinson's poetry, using the original handwritten manuscripts as his guide. Unlike previous editors, Johnson allowed Dickinson's unique choices to remain. The collection established her as a singular, innovative voice, a reputation that only continued growing through the decades.

A profile of Dickinson's ambiguous but close relationship with Susan Gilbert

Gilbert met Dickinson in 1850, and the two women quickly became very close, with Dickinson often pining for Gilbert in letters. In this essay, critic Maria Popova calls the relationship "beautiful, heartbreaking, unclassifiable," and details how it came to inspire Dickinson's writing, even after Gilbert married Dickinson's brother.

During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson was better known as a gardener than a poet.

Why one Emily Dickinson biographer believed she had epilepsy

Lyndall Gordon's "Lives Like Loaded Guns" points to a "handicap" referenced in several Dickinson poems. According to Gordon, the condition was so stigmatized during Dickinson's life that it made her reclusive. In this NPR interview, Gordon explains why she believes the theory is the best explanation for Dickinson's notorious isolation.

Why Emily Dickinson's poetry remains popular in the 21st century

Dickinson remains widely read and is often considered one of American literature's greatest poets. This short documentary from PBS uses a 2017 museum exhibition on the writer to explore her long-lasting impact, with input from Barbara Howe, a contemporary poet, and Marta Werner, a Dickinson scholar.

Listen to 3 scholars discuss the work of Emily Dickinson

Fiona Green, Linda Freedman, and Paraic Finnerty—three British academics who study Dickinson—discuss the poet's life, distinctive writing style, and impact on the generations who followed, illustrating that part of Dickinson's appeal lies in her open-ended verse, which invites readers' many interpretations.

Understanding the relationship between Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

One of Dickinson's most significant pen pals was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a minister, politician, and writer, who became a trusted creative adviser and, after her death, one of the editors of her first published volumes. Their relationship began after Dickinson sent him a letter asking, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"

The significance of Emily Dickinson's many personal letters

The first editors of Dickinson's posthumous collection of poetry heavily amended her work, making her private letters and drafts more valuable for what many perceive to be her more raw, unadulterated voice. Cristanne Miller, the editor of "The Letters of Emily Dickinson," discusses their importance and why so many of them were destroyed after Dickinson's death.

Emily Dickinson's poems were heavily altered after her death, with editors removing many of the peculiar aspects that readers now identify with her work.

Characterizing Emily Dickinson's distinctive poetic style

Dickinson's poems are generally short, untitled works that are lyrical, which means they seek to express feelings rather than narrate stories. They're also infused with common meter, a rhythm used in much popular music, and deploy frequent dashes as both punctuation and an idiosyncratic poetic device.

Emily Dickinson was a prolific baker

Dickinson scholars have collected her recipes for gingerbread, doughnuts, and more, noting that she often wrote poems on the backs of them. The Emily Dickinson Museum says that the kitchen "was a space of creative ferment for her, and that the writing of poetry mixed in her life with the making of delicate treats."

Read the poetry of Emily Dickinson

Dickinson wrote about 1,800 poems during her life, though the bulk of them weren't published until after her death in 1886. This collection from the Academy of American Poets brings together many of her most important (but untitled) works, which you can search by their first lines.

After her death, Emily Dickinson's editors marketed her as a children's poet, believing it would be the best way to have her work published.

Browse Emily Dickinson's collection of plant life

The poet began collecting plant life as a teen and assembling a herbarium, a collection of dried and pressed plants. The original book is housed in Harvard's rare book collection, but you can view digital scans of every page through the university's digital library.

Charles Dickens legally separated from his wife, then tried to have her committed to a mental asylum.

Browse Emily Dickinson's original handwritten poems

Harvard's Emily Dickinson Archive offers free access to the poet's papers from over a dozen libraries, allowing you to see the original drafts of some of her most famous works, sometimes scribbled on envelopes and scraps of paper. (And, even better, you can search the database by typing in your favorite lines!)

How Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman grappled with the American Civil War

Whitman, whose brother was injured while fighting for the Union, was often overt in his pro-Union poems. Dickinson, whose brother paid to have someone enlist under his name, was more subtle, though equally as affected, as this comparative analysis makes clear.

O’Connor shared lengthy, intimate letters with Betty Hester, a recluse

When O’Connor’s private letters were released in “The Habit of Being,” readers wondered about the identity of “A,” who had an intimate (possibly romantic) relationship with the writer. Decades later, “A” was revealed to be Betty Hester, a reclusive file clerk. Scholars still debate whether the two were romantically involved.

How Taylor Swift is related to poet Emily Dickinson

In 2024, genealogy site Ancestry.com claimed that the pop star and the poet were descended from a 17th-century English immigrant, Swift's ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson's sixth great-grandfather. That would make Swift and Dickinson sixth cousins, three times removed.

Why Henry David Thoreau was not a hermit

When many people think of "Walden," they think of a man who intentionally exiled himself from society. But that's inaccurate. Thoreau regularly welcomed guests and explained that he kept three chairs in his modest cabin: "one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."

How Emily Dickinson poetically deployed the em dash

Dickinson had many purposes for dashes in her poems: Sometimes they serve rhythm, sometimes they reflect the naturally fragmented way we tend to speak, and sometimes they are a simple artistic choice. This quick explainer breaks down how dashes work grammatically and how they operate in some of Dickinson's verses.

A prominent writer analyzes Thoreau's apparent contradictions

Some call Thoreau a monkish hermit living in the woods, while others say he's a privileged layabout who was playacting a simple life. In this essay, Rebecca Solnit argues that both of those assessments are caricatures that reduce a complex man who reckoned with complex ideas.

Whitman's antislavery writing often focused on white Americans

The poet was openly opposed to slavery, though some of his writing focuses on abolition’s benefits for white people rather than for the lives of the enslaved.

Poet Robert Lowell encouraged O'Connor to turn away from commercial appeal

When O'Connor secured a publisher for "Wise Blood," her publisher envisioned it as a broad, commercial comedy, something Lowell—the accomplished poet whom she met after graduate school at Yaddo, an artist colony in upstate New York—suggested she avoid, encouraging her to lean into her more esoteric and darker interests. This interview with O'Connor biographer Brad Gooch elaborates on that advice.

Abigail Adams received no formal schooling, but educated herself through reading

Despite receiving no formal education—standard for women of her era—Adams became well-read, largely through self-directed reading and extensive correspondence with leading political thinkers of her time, such as Thomas Jefferson and Mercy Otis Warren.

Busting the myths about Thoreau's 'Walden'

This resource from The Walden Woods Project dispels some of the common myths about Thoreau's time in the woods, including that he was a hermit (he actually regularly visited friends), that he was freeloading (he paid off his debts), that "Walden" was a misrepresentation (he was forthcoming about editing his experiences), and that he was opposed to progress (he believed in practical technology).

In 'Life of a Showgirl,' Taylor Swift nods to Pre-Raphaelite muse Elizabeth Siddal

Born in 1829, Siddal was an artist and poet who would become immortalized when she modeled for John Everett Millais' 1852 painting 'Ophelia,' depicting the suicidal lover from Shakespeare's 'Hamlet.' For years, Swift has alluded to Siddal as an exemplar of the sidelined female artist.

Explore a feminist reading of Mary Cassatt's work

Artsy's Olivia Horn considers the American Impressionist's work from a 21st-century perspective, unpacking how her focus on women's lives was a revolutionary act for the 19th century that still resonates today.

Austen grew up as a member of the 'pseudo-gentry'

Her family grew up near the upper crust of society, but was never fully of it; at times, the family struggled to make ends meet. Austen scholar Dr. Lizzie Rogers said this made her part of the "pseudo-gentry," a contemporary term naming a respected group that still fell short of the aristocratic "landed-gentry." Rogers believes that perspective informed the writer's novels, which often dealt with social conventions.

The Dylan/Whitman connection

Even before his 2016 Nobel Prize, critics often wrote about Bob Dylan with a seriousness typically reserved for literary figures. In this critical analysis, Jones Hogsed continues the tradition, analyzing Dylan's vision of America alongside Walt Whitman's.

Cassatt painted more than just mothers and daughters

In one 1884 portrait, she captured her brother, Alexander Cassatt, and her nephew during a family holiday. The image is just as tender as her paintings of mothers and daughters, with the father and son—their faces near mirror images—in an intimate embrace.

How Cassatt's early life influenced her art

The painter came from an affluent background but was determined to become an artist, a decision that was at odds with her father's wishes. Still, she began art school at 15, where she was one of the few female students and not permitted to paint portraits of live models. This brief documentary from The Art Tourist explains how those formative experiences taught Cassatt to challenge conventional approaches in her work.

Jane Austen's books were published anonymously during her life

In 19th-century England, novel-writing was considered unseemly, especially for women. Considering that, Austen's father and brother dealt directly with Jane's publishers. The author's name, meanwhile, was not attached to her books: "Sense and Sensibility," her first published novel, was simply labeled as being "By a Lady."

Scholars note that many Cassatt paintings are about women's labor

The women in her portraits are often performing domestic work, something that contemporary scholars consider a subtle protest of how women's labor was often overlooked during Cassatt's time. Fittingly, Cassatt often hired working-class women as models, ensuring the portraits were not only accurate but that the subjects were appropriately compensated.

'Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.'

- Legendary author Jane Austen (1775 -1817)

Poet Robert Lowell was once convinced communists were invading an artist colony

In 1949, the Pulitzer winner accused Elizabeth Ames, director of the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, of colluding with Agnes Smedley, a journalist who'd been staying on the property for years and who was working on a project sympathetic to communist causes.

A linguist argues Jane Austen's language is what defines her fiction

While many readers love Austen's novels for their characters and their romantic plots, Chi Luu argues that many people (including literary luminaries like Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Waldo Emerson) underestimate how her adept wordplay, sense of irony, and memorable turns of phrase are what have made readers fall in love with her fiction for centuries.

Jane Austen by the numbers

This feature from the Guardian takes a unique approach to Austen's literature, breaking her life, work, and fandom down into data. The slide deck includes comparative analyses of character employment, net worth, and age. Below is a breakdown of Austen's unexpected posthumous rise to fame.

O’Connor was shaped by her time with Sally and Robert Fitzgerald

After Iowa, O’Connor moved to Connecticut to stay in the garage apartment of Sally and Robert Fitzgerald—the legendary translator of Homer, Sophocles, and other classics—while working on her first novel, “Wise Blood.” Like O’Connor, the Fitzgeralds were devout Catholics, and the three attended mass every morning.

Joan Didion's 1967 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' laid the hippie counterculture bare

Didion wrote a detailed account of living alongside hippies in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury area in the 1960s. Beyond their style and politics, Didion uncovered chaos, with one particularly shocking interview of a 5-year-old on LSD. Her stories challenged the movement's message of freedom and utopia in California.

Whitman revolutionized American poetry

Whitman was a groundbreaking force in American literature, legitimizing the national idiom, capturing the spirit of the evolving country, and inspiring younger generations of writers for centuries to follow.

Jane Austen used satire to critique women's place in society

Although the novelist is sometimes dismissed as a romance writer, her stories feature pointed societal critiques, especially of women's limited options and challenged popular notions that women were subservient and passive.

More than 1,100 letters between Abigail and John Adams have survived

Their correspondence is a rich collection of American history. The letters provide a personal glimpse into the Revolution, the early republic, and the dynamics of one of America's most significant marriages.

Jane Austen was unhappy in the city of Bath, but it inspired some of her books

In 1801, Austen's father retired and abruptly moved the family from Steventon to Bath. Austen loathed her new home, but she used it as the setting for pieces of her novels "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey." "The scandals and shallowness of the city fueled her cynicism and wit; nothing escaped her scathing pen," an exhibition on Austen from the Bath Preservation Trust explained.

One Mary Cassatt painting features a sly political message

Critics had long been puzzled by the unrealistic flower pinned to the woman's chest in the 1905 painting "Mother and Child." In exploring the painting's history, researcher Nikki Georgopulos discovered that the flower alluded to a women's suffrage badge popular at the time, something Cassatt emphasized in the painting's original title, "Woman With a Sunflower."

What made Mary Cassatt's art radical

Although the American Impressionist's work is sometimes dismissed as overly sentimental, these Cassatt specialists argue that her portrayals of women are often subtly subversive, emphasizing how they defy the gender norms of the time.

Whitman left school at 11 to help his family

The poet's family was poor and moved several times during his childhood. At 11, his father removed Whitman from school so he could work to support the family.

Mary Cassatt's sister, Lydia, moved to Paris to manage her household so Mary could focus on her painting, a dynamic that inadvertently turned Lydia into her sister's muse.