Emily Dickinson led a quiet life, treasuring her privacy and eventually giving herself over completely to her art: it was in her poetry that she “deliberately decided to live” and there that she is most clearly revealed to us. Yet until now, no biography of this most enigmatic of American poets has attempted to unravel the intricate relationship between the poet’s life and her poetry, between the life of her mind and the voice of her poems. Now, Cynthia Griffin Wolff (author of the highly acclaimed A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton) gives us a brilliantly literary biography of Emily Dickinson that reveals this relationship through a rich, comprehensive understanding of Dickinson herself and a new, extraordinarily illuminating reading of her exquisite yet often daunting poems.
Cynthia Griffin Wolff was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She is a graduate of Radcliffe College, attended Harvard Medical School, and in 1965 received her Ph.D. in English at Harvard University. For many years, Professor Wolff taught English and American literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Presently, she holds the Class of 1922 Professorship of the Humanities at M.I.T. Ms. Wolff is the author of the highly acclaimed biographies A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton and Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth Century Puritan Character. She now lives in Belmont Massachusetts.
Emily Dickinson led a quiet life, treasuring her privacy and eventually giving herself over completely to her art: it was in her poetry that she “deliberately decided to live” and there that she is most clearly revealed to us. Yet until now, no biography of this most enigmatic of American poets has attempted to unravel the intricate relationship between the poet’s life and her poetry, between the life of her mind and the voice of her poems. Now, Cynthia Griffin Wolff (author of the highly acclaimed A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton) gives us a brilliantly literary biography of Emily Dickinson that reveals this relationship through a rich, comprehensive understanding of Dickinson herself and a new, extraordinarily illuminating reading of her exquisite yet often daunting poems.
Author
Cynthia Griffin Wolff was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She is a graduate of Radcliffe College, attended Harvard Medical School, and in 1965 received her Ph.D. in English at Harvard University. For many years, Professor Wolff taught English and American literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Presently, she holds the Class of 1922 Professorship of the Humanities at M.I.T. Ms. Wolff is the author of the highly acclaimed biographies A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton and Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth Century Puritan Character. She now lives in Belmont Massachusetts.
