Emily Dickinson

Unhappily for Dickinson, the one man who seems to have unequivocally loved her and may have wished to marry her died of a stroke in 1884, before anything like a formal engagement was announced. Broken in spirit by this loss, as by numerous others including the terrible typhoid death of a beloved little nephew, Dickinson herself grew ill and died in 1886, at the age of fifty-five. --Joyce Carol Oates, The Woman in White, New York Review of Books, September 25, 2008, review of A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade, by Christopher Benfey, and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple


On this author:

How many know that Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the radical abolitionist who was one of the "Secret Six" who supported John Brown's bold raid on Harpers Ferry, later became the literary confidant of the reclusive apolitical poet Emily Dickinson? --Jane Ciabattari, Emily Dickinson’s Friendship With Abolitionist, National Book Critics Circle, Powell's Review-a-Day, October 1, 2008, review of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple

We still don’t know why Dickinson elected, well past her youth, to don only virginal white or — beyond a sense of shared mental and social superiority — what caused the members of her family to cling so tightly to one another. --Miranda Seymour, Emily’s Tryst, The New York Times, August 22, 2008, review of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple

Dickinson's circumscribed life -- partly chosen, partly imposed -- was, no doubt, conducive to writing. But it left her relatively unbuffered against the deaths of family and friends, visitations that progressively harrowed her. --Bill Christophersen, Emily's Ambassador, The Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2008, review of White Heat, by Brenda Wineapple

Dickinson’s externally uneventful life has been chronicled before, but Brenda Wineapple finds a new way in by focusing on her relationship with the man who would eventually help to bring her to the public gaze after her death. --The Economist, Hers and his, July 24, 2008, review of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple


--Yellow Rose of Emily (#17), from Oh No, Not Emily: An Operetta of Academia, Fraud & Emily Dickinson, YouTube, June 19, 2006

Emily Dickinson's Herbarium, reviewed by Elizabeth Schmidt, The New York Times, December 3, 2006

Poet's Choice, column by Robert Pinsky, Washington Post, January 23, 2005