Dickinson, Emily [Elizabeth]
Dickinson, Emily [Elizabeth]( 1830–86),the daughter of Edward Dickinson, a prominent lawyer of Amherst, Mass., was educated at Amherst Academy and for one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, under Mary Lyon. Her life was outwardly eventless, for she lived quietly at home and for the last 25 years secluded herself from all but the most intimate friends. Though never married, she cultivated intense intellectual companionships with several men in succession, whom she quaintly called her tutors. The first was Benjamin F. Newton, a law student in her father's office, who introduced her to stimulating books and urged her to take seriously her vocation as poet. Religious questionings prompted by his early death led her to appeal for guidance to the Rev. Charles Wadsworth of Philadelphia, whom she met in 1854. She soon came to regard him as her “dearest earthly friend,” and for purposes of poetry created in his image the “lover” whom she...
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