The Life of Emily Dickinson.
After getting my midterm prospectus back and reading all the feedback given to me, I realized the original topic I chose was too broad. There is no way I would be able to compare the lives of Toni Morrison and Emily Dickinson. So now I will try and compare thier works and show how each of them break standards in thier work. .
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born onDecember 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusettes. She is the second daughter of Edward andEmily Norcross Dickinson. Emily, her older brother Austin, andher younger sister Lavinia were raised in a quiet, reserved family. Her father was very stern, and her mother was not always there for Emily and her siblings. This absence, one can speculate, might have caused some of Emily's eccentricity. Massachusetts in the 1800's was dominantly Puritan; therefore, Emily Dickinson was raised in the Christian tradition and was expected to take up her father's religious beliefs and values without protest. As Emily got older, she started to challenge these conventional religious viewpoints of her father and the church. These challenges she met would later contribute to the strength of her poetry.
Dickinson's father was a prominent politician in Amherst and enjoyed an exciting public life and much popularity in their community. Dickinson, on the contrary, did not enjoy this and began to withdraw from teh public. She did not agree witht he religion of her father, so he began to start censoring the books she read because they could potentially draw her away from his religion. Emily had the opportunity of a good education and attended the Amherst Academy. After she finished her studies there, she left for the South Hadley Female Seminary. After spending only one short year at the seminary, Dickinson returned home in 1848. This is when she started to live a life of seclusion.
When Emily had a sizable collection of poems, she sought out somebody for advice about anonymous publication.