Emily Dickinson

Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Rockefeller awardee, and a resident at Bellagio, Bogliasco, and the Bunting Institute. She recently received the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service to American literature. Her 2013 A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present is her 53rd book. She has written two other books for this series, one on Ernest Hemingway and the other, in both 1999 and 2003, on Sylvia Plath. She writes widely on twentieth-century American literature, biography, women's writing and pedagogy. Her publications include A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (2000), William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism (2002), Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Hemingway: Eight Decades of Criticism (2009).

"Palgrave Macmillan's 'Literary Lives' series exists not so much to answer intriguing biographical questions as to establish the link between the art and the life that gives rise to these questions. Wagner-Martin, with acclaimed biographies of Sylvia Plath and Zelda Fitzgerald to her credit, does a superb job here of teasing out the implications of that connection." The Independent "Reliable, accessible, and compact, this is a valuable book. Summing up: Highly recommended. All readers." CHOICE

• List of Illustrations Preface 1. Reaching 1850 2. Dickinson's Search, to Find the Poem of Her Being 3. Losses into Art 4. Dickinson's Expanding Readership 5. Dickinson and War 6. Colonel Higginson as Mentor 7. Life Without Home, For the Last Time 8. Dickinson's Fascicles, Beginning and Endings 9. The Painful Interim 10. To Define Belief 11. 1865, The Late Miracle 12. Maintaining Urgency 13. Colonel Higginson, Appearing 14. 1870-1873 15. The Beginning of the Calendar of Deaths 16. Surviving Death 17. 'Mother's Hopeless Illness' 18. Courtships 19. 'The Poets light but Lamps' 20. The Loving Dickinson Bibliography Index