Emily Dickinson ─ A Literary Life

Now published in paperback for the first time, 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 life 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.

Linda Wagner-Martin has published nearly sixty books about American letters; she recently was awarded the Hubbell Medal for a lifetime of work in American literature. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Bunting Institute fellow, the recipient of a senior National Endowment for the Humanities and many other grants, including residencies at Bogliasco and Bellagio. The recipient of many teaching and mentoring awards at both University of North Carolina and Michigan State University, she has worked extensively to make American literature a broadly based field for scholarly exploration. She has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States as well as its anthology, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, and textbooks on both poetry and women's literature.