Books Written by Emily Dickinson

None in the usual sense. She published only about ten poems in her lifetime, anonymously, and never a book. Her nearly 1,800 poems and her letters have appeared in many posthumous editions; fourteen key ones are on this page, from Poems (1890) to The Letters of Emily Dickinson (2024).

Poems (1890), Poems: Second Series (1891), Poems: Third Series (1896), Johnson’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955), The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), The Complete Poems (1960), Final Harvest (1961), The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981), Franklin’s Variorum Edition (1998), Open Me Carefully (1998), the Reading Edition (1999), The Gorgeous Nothings (2013), Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (2016) and The Letters of Emily Dickinson (2024).

With Final Harvest (1961), Thomas H. Johnson’s selection of 576 poems from his complete edition. It is far more manageable than a complete edition of nearly 1,800 poems. When you want all of them, move on to Franklin’s Reading Edition (1999) or Johnson’s Complete Poems (1960).

She has no single famous book, because the poems were collected by editors after her death. The best-known editions are The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960), edited by Thomas H. Johnson, and R. W. Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998, with a one-volume reading edition in 1999). Her most famous poems include “Because I could not stop for Death” and “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”.

Nearly 1,800. Johnson’s 1955 edition counted 1,775 poems and substantial fragments; Franklin’s 1998 edition counts 1,789. About ten were published in her lifetime, anonymously and edited by others. After her death in 1886 her sister Lavinia found the poems, about 800 of them copied into forty hand-sewn booklets known as fascicles.

R. W. Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998), which prints every known version of each poem; his one-volume Reading Edition (1999) gives one text of each. The history behind that: the first editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, added titles and regularised her punctuation, metre and rhymes in the 1890s. Todd, who from 1882 was in a relationship with Dickinson’s brother Austin, kept part of the manuscripts, and the split between her family and the Dickinsons produced competing editions until the 1940s. Thomas H. Johnson’s edition of 1955 was the first to print all the poems with her dashes and capitals, and his one-volume Complete Poems (1960) is still a good reading text. Franklin then rebuilt her booklets (1981) and re-dated and re-numbered the poems (1998).

Nobody knows for certain. She sent poems to friends and correspondents, including the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whom she first wrote to in 1862, and the handful printed in her lifetime appeared anonymously and altered by editors. Scholars have suggested that she disliked those changes, or simply did not write for publication; she left no full explanation.

Not quite. As a young woman she studied at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and in 1855 she spent three weeks in Washington and two in Philadelphia. From the late 1860s she rarely left the Homestead, her family’s house in Amherst, and she sometimes spoke to visitors through a door, but she kept up an active correspondence all her life and received a few visitors, among them Higginson in 1870.

An American poet (1830–1886) who wrote nearly 1,800 poems, almost none of them published in her lifetime. She lived nearly all her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and became increasingly private in her later decades. She is now counted among the most important poets in American literature, known for her compressed, dash-punctuated style and her poems on death, faith, nature and the inner life.

No. She never married and had no children. She lived all her life in her father’s houses in Amherst. Her closest attachments, kept up largely through letters, included her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Dickinson, who lived next door, and correspondents such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

She died at home in Amherst on 15 May 1886, aged 55, after about two and a half years of illness and seven months confined to bed. Her death certificate gives Bright’s disease, a broad term at the time for kidney disease and hypertensive symptoms. Researchers cited by the Emily Dickinson Museum now conclude she died of heart failure caused by severe high blood pressure.

55. She was born on 10 December 1830 at the Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, and died there on 15 May 1886.

This is debated rather than settled. Dickinson wrote more than 300 letters to Susan Gilbert, who married her brother Austin in 1856 and lived next door, more than to anyone else, and many are intensely emotional. Many scholars read the relationship as romantic; others see an intense friendship in the conventions of nineteenth-century letters between women. In 1998 The New York Times reported that infrared imaging showed Susan’s name had been erased from manuscripts. Dickinson left no explicit statement about her sexuality. Open Me Carefully (1998) collects the letters.

There is no diagnosis: autism was not a clinical category in her lifetime. Some modern writers have speculated about autism or other neurodivergence because of her withdrawal from society and her intensely patterned writing, but this is retrospective speculation, not established biography.

If you mean the television series Dickinson, a comedy-drama with Hailee Steinfeld as the young Emily, it ran for three seasons from 2019 to 2021 and streams on Apple TV+.

Yes, distantly. In March 2024 Ancestry reported that they are sixth cousins, three times removed, both descended from a seventeenth-century English immigrant who settled in Windsor, Connecticut. In 2022 Swift had said that if her lyrics sound “like a letter written by Emily Dickinson’s great-grandmother while sewing a lace curtain”, she is writing in her “quill” style.

It opens “How happy is the little Stone / That rambles in the Road alone”, and envies a stone for being free of careers, emergencies and other people’s judgement, independent “as the Sun”. It is usually read as a wry, compact poem about the exhaustion of self-consciousness. It is number 1510 in Johnson’s edition and was first printed in Poems: Second Series (1891), under the title “Simplicity”, which Dickinson did not give it.

Enkele van haar meest geliefde gedichten zijn “Because I could not stop for Death”, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”, “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” en “How happy is the little Stone”. Ze staan in elke volledige editie, zoals de Reading Edition van Franklin of de Complete Poems van Johnson. Voor een eerste kennismaking is Final Harvest, Johnsons selectie van 576 gedichten, het beste begin.