Emily Dickinson

Fiona Green: We tend to imagine Dickinson as a solitary figure, I think, and to emphasise perhaps the reclusive character of her life, but it's as well to know that she was born into and raised in a very sociable and outward-looking family. So she's born, as you say, in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and this is a small but quite busy college town. And the Dickinson family are very much involved, both in the church, the First Amherst Church, the Congregational Church, and in the College itself. So in fact, Dickinson's grandfather had been among the founders of Amherst College.

Linda Friedman: In one sense, I think her Puritan heritage gave her something to react against, to ironise, to satirise. She quite famously rejected the Puritans' industry and morals and every righteous thing, she called it. But it more importantly, I think, fed her imagination and her sense of poetic vocation. And one of the reasons for this, I think, is that actually her first, one of her first and most affecting experiences of fiction was in the context of a religious experience. When she went to church, when she heard these very, very powerful sermons being given by the ministers, she was absolutely fascinated by what their words could do.

Fiona Green: Perhaps what we should talk about is the really teasing question which is whether Susan had a part in drafting the poems because Dickinson sent her 250 poems to the house next door and many scholars have thought recently that there was a kind of workshop going on between the Homestead and the Evergreens that Susan was Dickinson's first editor in a way and we do have one example of a poem that Dickinson and rewrote because Susan Gilbert wasn't satisfied with it.

Porrick Finnity: For many, many years, I guess Dickinson scholars have focused on Dickinson's poems about suffering and death, and have read them about Dickinson. Whereas I think more recently, people have thought about the way in which Dickinson is writing so many poems between these years of the Civil War. And they've looked again at those poems of suffering and death and thought, well, actually, maybe Dickinson is imagining what it would be like to be a soldier or what it would be like to have somebody in your family lost in the war.