excerpt nea.gov
Emily Dickinson, age 16 (Courtesy of Amherst College Archives and Special Collections)
Dickinson's room (Courtesy of the Emily Dickinson Museum)
It's very, very unusual that way. But people have regarded her as an eccentric, which she is. And as a kind of almost a phobic shy person who lived in western Massachusetts. Sometime in her 20s decided never to -- not only never to go to another city, never to go to Boston anymore, but never to go out of the house. "I will not cross my father's ground for any house or town," she told Thomas Wentworth Higginson. So we see her as, kind of, alone and cut off from the world. And what this friendship does, and what I hope it does, is suggest the ways in which she was really very much part of the world. That she didn't have to go out to know what was going on. That she had a very active, creative, imaginative, and in a certain way, social life.
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Library of Congress |
Literary biographer Brenda Wineapple discusses her book,White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. [28:47]
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