Thresholds

Emily Dickinson entered into this world on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, and died in the same town, in the family homestead, “quite suddenly” as her friend Clara Newman Turner wrote, on May 15, 1886. She was fifty-five years old. Her doctor listed the cause as Bright’s disease (what we now call nephritis or kidney failure) and its duration as two and a half years. Already Clara Newman Turner’s “quite suddenly” is one of countless misrepresentations we find about Emily Dickinson. In 1885 Dickinson wrote that she saw “a great darkness coming” and fainted while baking in the kitchen. On November 30, 1885, her weakness was so worrying that her brother, Austin, canceled a trip to Boston. She spent the next months in bed. The last thing she wrote was that famous haiku-like note to the Norcross sisters: “Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily.” Austin remembered in his diary that “the day was awful … she ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the whistle sounded for six.

Emily Dickinson never married. She was in love once, twice, maybe three times, it’s hard to tell. There is so much legend. But she did indeed favor white for clothing. She was often accused of being shy—aloof, apart. “Best things dwell out of sight,” she whispers. For years her privacy was directed at unfamiliar company, though by the end she hid from almost everyone but Austin and her sister, Lavinia, or conversed from behind the cracked door of her threshold. She graduated from Amherst Academy in 1847. The following year brought the longest time she was ever away from home, when she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. It was ten miles away. She stayed for ten months. And so, at the age of seventeen, Emily Dickinson came home and turned herself into a primary housekeeper, rarely leaving again. The farthest she got from Amherst came in the spring of 1855, when she, her mother, and her sister spent three weeks in Washington, D.C., where her father served in Congress as a Massachusetts representative; they stopped on the way home in Philadelphia for two weeks of family visits.