When Emily Dickinson withdrew from the society of Amherst, Massachusetts, a light went on in her room that burned until her death in 1886. She was writing poems—hundreds upon hundreds of poems—that her sister Vinnie later discovered stuffed in a bureau drawer. During her lifetime, no one had guessed at the magnitude of her output.

Emily's outer world was bounded by the hedge around the Homestead on Main Street and filled with her books and flowers from her garden and conservatory. But as she became more involved with her creative inner life, her white-clad figure in the garden became a rare sight. There was the writing to be done, and the light burned.

So illusive is Emily Dickinson's solitary life, that only in the poems and letters, in effect the light she cast on the members of her family and friends, were the biographers able to find the living person: the child growing up with an active and close-knit family; the young woman following, at first, the conventions of life in the small New England town; and, always, the poet whose inner vision saw the rarest images in the world she finally shut out.

From the dust jacket