Krystyna Poray Goddu - Becoming Emily: The Life of Emily Dickinson

from Becoming Emily:

B ut it was to her friend Jane that Emily confided something new and very important in her life. Even as she wrote of her conflicting religious feelings, she turned to another subject. She wrote with great excitement, but vaguely, as though she were afraid to express exactly what was happening. I have dared to do strange things, she began, bold things, and have asked no advice from anyI have heeded beautiful tempters, yet do not think I am wrong.

She longs to sit down with Jane and confess to an experience bitter, and sweet, but the sweet did so beguile meand life has had an aim, and the world has been too precious for your poorand striving sister! She wrote that things were budding, and springing, and singing. Jane could probably make no sense of what Emily was trying to tell her. But most scholars agree that Emily, at the age of 19, was trying to describe her first attempts at writing poetry.

Krystyna Poray Goddu is the author of A Girl Called Vincent and An Unlikely Ballerina and coauthor, with Krystyna Mihulka, of Krysia. She has contributed to American Girl magazine, Publishers Weekly, the New York Times Book Review, and the Riverbank Review of Books for Young Readers.

Jacket design: Lindsey Cleworth Schauer

Front cover illustration: Giselle Potter

Printed in the United States of America

Copyright 2019 by Krystyna Poray Goddu

All rights reserved

Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-0-89733-003-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goddu, Krystyna Poray, author.

Title: Becoming Emily : the life of Emily Dickinson / Krystyna Poray Goddu. Description: Chicago, Illinois : Chicago Review Press Incorporated, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018024637 (print) | LCCN 2018033675 (ebook) | ISBN 9780914091004 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780914091196 (epub) | ISBN 9780914091127 (kindle) | ISBN 9780897330039 | ISBN 9780897330039 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Dickinson, Emily, 18301886. | Women poets, American19th centuryBiography.

Classification: LCC PS1541.Z5 (ebook) | LCC PS1541.Z5 G63 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024637

Interior design: Sarah Olson

Excerpts from Emily Dickinsons poems and letters from the following volumes are used by permission of Harvard University Press:

The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Associate Editor, Theodora Ward, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright renewed 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson. Copyright 1960 by Mary L. Hampson.

Printed in the United States of America

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This book is dedicated to the memory of Leslie Maria Farrell Layman (19872017)

Much loved, much missed