Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in a large white house built by her grandfather. Emily was the middle child of a well known lawyer and one-term U.S. congressional representative. She had a younger sister and an older brother. Emily enjoyed nature and enjoyed reading authors such as Keats, Browning, Ruskin, and Ralph Emerson. They were all influences to her when she wrote.
Emily went to primary school for four years and then attended Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847. From 1847-1848 she studied at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary but sever homesickness led her to return home. In the 1850s she began writing poetry voluminously, organizing her work into small booklets. It is assumed that Emily separated herself from the world and turned into writing poetry because of a love dilemma. "During a trip to Philadelphia in the early 1850s, Emily fell in love with a married minister, the Reverent Charles Wadsworth. Her disappointment in love may have brought about her subsequent withdrawal from society" (Napierkowski 233). After the trip from Philadelphia Emily began dressing in all white and did not have much association with other people. She carried on more communication through letters and poems. When Emily did have outside contact with people it was mostly with letters, which included poems. The people whom she did communicate with had an intense impact on her poetry. Most of her life and time was spent on her writing. In 1862 Emily sent four poems to American writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson for his opinion. He did not publish the poems. Only seven of Emily's poems were published anonymously during her lifetime.
"The extent of her seclusion was the point that when her father died in 1874, she did not attend his funeral. She listened to the service nearby cemetery through a window in her upstairs bedroom" (Napierkowski 233). She heard many services through that window and wrote many poems about death in that room.
