Emily Dickinson

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Reaching 1850

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 1-12

3. Dickinson’s Search, to Find the Poem of Her Being

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 13-23

4. Losses into Art

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 24-35

5. Dickinson’s Expanding Readership

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 36-44

6. Dickinson and War

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 45-53

7. Colonel Higginson as Mentor

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 54-64

8. Life Without Home, For the Last Time

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 65-76

9. Dickinson’s Fascicles, Beginnings and Endings

   • Linda Wagner-Martin

   Pages 77-82

10. The Painful Interim

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 83-91

11. To Define “Belief”

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 92-102

12. 1865, The Late Miracle

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 103-109

13. Maintaining Urgency

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 110-120

14. Colonel Higginson, Appearing

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 121-129

15. 1870–1873

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 130-135

16. The Beginning of the Calendar of Deaths

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 136-144

17. Surviving Death

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 145-150

18. “Mother’s Hopeless Illness”

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 151-158

19. Courtships

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 159-165

20. “The Poets Light but Lamps”

    • Linda Wagner-Martin

    Pages 166-173

With special attention to Emily Dickinson's growth into a poet, this literary biographical study charts Dickinson's hard-won brilliance as she worked, largely alone, to become the unique American woman writer of the nineteenth century.

• America
• poem
• poet

"Palgrave Macmillan's 'Literary Lives' series exists not so much to answer intriguing biographical questions as to establish the link between the art and the life that gives rise to these questions. Wagner-Martin, with acclaimed biographies of Sylvia Plath and Zelda Fitzgerald to her credit, does a superb job here of teasing out the implications of that connection." The Independent

"Reliable, accessible, and compact, this is a valuable book. Summing up: Highly recommended. All readers." CHOICE

• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

  Linda Wagner-Martin

Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Rockefeller awardee, and a resident at Bellagio, Bogliasco, and the Bunting Institute. She recently received the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service to American literature. Her 2013 A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present is her 53rd book. She has written two other books for this series, one on Ernest Hemingway and the other, in both 1999 and 2003, on Sylvia Plath. She writes widely on twentieth-century American literature, biography, women's writing and pedagogy. Her publications include A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (2000), William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism (2002), Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Hemingway: Eight Decades of Criticism (2009).

Policies and ethics