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Informationen zum Autor Alfred Habegger, formerly a professor of English at the University of Kansas, lives with his wife, Nellie, in northeastern Oregon. His previous books include Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature an da prize-winning biography, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. Klappentext Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography, Alfred Habegger presents the first thorough account of Dickinson's growth-a richly contextualized story of genius in the process of formation and then in the act of overwhelming production. Building on the work of former and contemporary scholars, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books brings to light a wide range of new material from legal archives, congregational records, contemporary women's writing, and previously unpublished fragments of Dickinson's own letters. Habegger discovers the best available answers to the pressing questions about the poet: Was she lesbian? Who was the person she evidently loved? Why did she refuse to publish and why was this refusal so integral an aspect of her work? Habegger also illuminates many of the essential connection sin Dickinson's story: between the decay of doctrinal Protestantism and the emergence of her riddling lyric vision; between her father's political isolation after the Whig Party's collapse and her private poetic vocation; between her frustrated quest for human intimacy and the tuning of her uniquely seductive voice. The definitive treatment of Dickinson's life and times, and of her poetic development, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books shows how she could be both a woman of her era and a timeless creator. Although many aspects of her life and work will always elude scrutiny, her living, changing profile at least comes into focus in this meticulous and magisterial biography. Leseprobe Chapter 1 Amherst and the Fathers Sometime between 1636 and 1638, Emily Dickinson's earliest American progenitors in the paternal line, Nathaniel and Ann Gull Dickinson, left the parish of Billingborough in Lincolnshire, England, for the raw British outpost of Wethersfield, Connecticut. One motive for their drastic move was a determination to practice without interference the militant late-Reformation faith known as Puritanism. The times were hot with rebellion against the Church of England. In 1659 Nathaniel, Ann, and their children moved north into Massachusetts with a number of other families and established a town along the fertile Connecticut Valley deep in Norwottuck country. They called it Hadley, and Nathaniel played a leading role in organizing and regulating its municipal, educational, religious, and military affairs. When savage warfare broke out in 1675 between the indigenous peoples and the English, three of his nine sons were slain. When England's Puritan rule ended and those who had condemned Charles I to the headsman's block fled for their lives, they ended up in this frontier town, founded on righteousness and violence. And when a new town was carved out of Hadley's eastern parts a century later, in 1759, it was named for the man who would recommend using smallpox-infected blankets to "extirpate" the Indians: Lord Jeffrey Amherst. By 1830, the year Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, the area was thick with light-skinned farmers bearing her last name, and the ancestral zealotry had moderated into a quirky hardheaded stubbornness known locally as Dickinson grit. A Dickinson reunion held there in 1883 was attended by a huge number of Nathaniel's descendants, who listened to a minister declaim a versified panegyric composed by Elizabeth Dickinson Currier, one of Emily's aunts. The poem t...
