Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830 to a well known family in politics and in education. Her father was an orthodox Calvinist, a lawyer, a treasurer for Amherst College, and also served in Congress. Her mother Emily Norcross Dickinson, on the other hand, did not have a powerful presence in Emily’s life. She had a younger sister named Lavinia and an older brother Austin. Emily went to school at Amherst Academy (1834-47) and then to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (1847-48). Dickinson started to write poems around 1850; her first poems were in a fairly conventional style, but after ten years of practice she began to experiment with her poetry. Emily’s poems are often written in the metre of hymns; they deal not only with issues of death, faith and immortality, but also with nature, domesticity, and the power and limits of language transferring the feelings of ecstasy and terror onto paper.

Dickinson had never married; however, she had been known to be in relationships with several men who had been her close friends, confidantes, and mentors. She had also been known to have an intimate relationship with Susan Huntington Gilbert, who had been her friend soon became her sister-in-law by marrying her brother Austin. Austin and Susan had remained extremely close with Emily and lived next door to her. In 1864, Emily Dickinson had visited Boston for eye treatments. Ten years later in 1874, Emily’s father died in Boston. A year later in 1875, her mother suffered from paralysis and died in 1882. Emily Dickinson died on May 15, 1886 in her hometown Amherst, Massachusetts. In 1858, she had put together many of her poems into packets of 'fascicles', which she made herself with a needle and thread. The first edition of Emily’s poems, which were edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, were published in 1890. In 1955, Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in three volumes, making all her poetry available.