They were a distinguished, respected and long-established New England family. The family males had intense dedication to public causes and a sense of responsibility to the community. They were unbending, joyless and Calvinistic.

Samuel, Emily's granddaddy, a lawyer, was responsible almost single-handedly for the founding of Amherst College. He believed in it heart and soul to the point of bankruptcy.

Emily's father was Samuel's oldest child, Edward. The forerunner of four brothers and four sisters, he attended Yale, graduated as Valedictorian, apprenticed in his father's office. He learned a lesson from his father's altruism. He never let his concern for the community impinge on his own economic security.

Amherst, set apart by the surrounding Pelham Hills, lay a long day's journey from anywhere. In the summer the town was green and "unspeakably quiet." The central common was surrounded by a crude fence and was full of weeds. The streets were untidy and littered with debris. With winter the town grew bleak and numb, its unpaved streets clogged with snow. Temperatures near zero encouraged people to stay indoors close to their stoves.

Edward married Emily Norcross. By this time he had developed a forceful and dominating personality. His wife was passive and submissive. This was probably her chief attraction as far as Edward was concerned. She had been sent to boarding school in Connecticut but returned at age 19 to live at home for five years until she married Edward at 24. They had three children: Austin, Emily, and Lavinia (Vinnie). Austin was 20 months old when Emily was born; Lavinia arrived 27 months later. Mrs. Dickinson recovered very slowly from Lavinia's birth and the baby did not thrive during these first months. Emily was displaced.

The family had moved into the one half of Edward's father's house, trying to help with Samuel's precarious financial situation. Edward found the closeness of his plaintive mother trying.

Samuel sold his half to David Mack and moved to Cincinnati after Lavinia's birth. For the next 10 years, Edward continued to rent his half of the house from the new landlord.

It was a drafty brick building built in 1813. It had large elms which overshadowed and screened it from the street. There was nothing special about it except its size of 20 odd rooms. It was difficult to heat and, of course, devoid of plumbing.

The Dickinson children first attended Amherst Academy, and Emily went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadly. Lavinia went to Wheaton in Ipswich. Emily impressed her teachers as being gifted but physically delicate and nervous.

When she was ten, the family moved to another house where they lived until Emily was 24. At this time Edward, whose law practice had become lucrative, was able to buy back the entire mansion lost by his father. Neither she or her mother was willing to move back to the somber Main Street house. Edward had decided the matter. They had no choice.

When Emily was six, Edward served in the state legislature. When she was 10, he was elected to the senate and when she was 21, he became a congressman. As his political aspirations grew, he spent more and more time away from his family, leaving his children in the care of his timid and dependent wife.

When Emily was 13, she become depressed following the death of a school friend and missed two months of school. The following year she stayed home for the fall semester feeling down-spirited. The following July she had a cough. She withdrew and stayed out until December. The next year she stayed about six months with a cough, depression and tears. By August 1848, at age 18, she had finished her formal schooling.

During the religious revivals of 1845, she was unable to avoid her teachers' exhortations to accept Christ. The pressure was relentless to bring the sinful and young girls to their knees. This experience was painful for Emily.

All of her immediate family, with the exception of herself, joined the Congregational Church. This seemed to be important to her mother, to join. Emily never joined a church.

Austin had gotten his law degree at Harvard. Emily and Lavinia, when their schooling was completed, remained at home. All three of the children spent the rest of their lives within a stone's throw of the house where they were born.

Austin wanted to move to Chicago with his new wife, Susan. His father built a house for them next door to the homestead which he and his family occupied until their deaths. Austin's marriage was not a happy one.

Emily before she was thirty, and never afterwards, was away from home about a half dozen times. In her early thirties she traveled to Cambridge port twice for treatments for an eye disorder. There she boarded with her cousins, was treated as an out-patient, and each time stayed about six months.

Emily, in the eyes of the town, became strange and incomprehensible. Finally she withdrew from its gaze altogether and became a recluse concealed within her parent's house. The outsiders referred to her in time as "the myth."

This had a firm basis in fact. By the time she was 22, she was going out of her way to avoid meeting people. By the time she was 28, she ran if the doorbell rang. By the time of 30, she retreated to her room upstairs when old friends called, and listened to their voices downstairs. By the time she was 31, she began to dress exclusively in white. She maintained this for the rest of her life.

If Lavinia was not in the house, even during hot weather she felt compelled to keep every window locked and the gas jets lit to keep out the darkness. Her fears, she wrote to cousins, gave her "a snarl in the brain which don't unravel yet."

These pent-up feelings and signs of irrational fear increased and became more incapacitating as she grew older.

This craving for affection which smolders throughout her poetry and letters seems to have driven Colonel Higginson, who met her in 1870 when she was 39. She had sent him four poems and asked his opinion of them. He referred to her as partially cracked. His wife called her "insane." To the neighbors of Amherst who knew her as person not poet, she appeared pathetically withdrawn, eccentric or insane.

Her father died suddenly away from home when she was 43. Her mother a year later was paralyzed with a stroke. She lingered seven years, requiring continuous nursing care.

Emily outlived her mother by only four years, dying in 1886 at the age of 55, with the complications of chronic renal disorder. The death records say Bright's Disease.

The simplest answer, but the least generally acceptable one, to pain of her poetry is that the poems portray the terror of a mind collapsing under pressures that exceed its endurance. The mind is Emily Dickinson's own.

What do we find when we survey Emily Dickinson's subject matter? Death, renunciation, sexual conflicts, psychological distress, religious doubts, and love of nature. And each of them can be shown to have taproots that extend down to her unsatisfying relationship with her mother.

Most of us have something of the abnormal in us, an emotional scar, and most of us would suffer anything rather than admit the fact to ourselves. Most of us who read her poems see ourselves in them. Thus lies the difficulty. Many of us -- not aware that the insane can be intelligent, warm, suffering, introspective, that is, human -- take the greatness of her poetry as proof that she never did break down.

Poor Emily, her loves were always inaccessible. Her father, her brother, who married Sue who at 30 became pregnant. Again, she is rejected and displaced, displaced by a child. Tradition has it that her next was a married man. Celestial marriages are not what most married men have in mind and it is not surprising that by 1862 she is suggesting "Take your heaven farther on," and by the third year she is writing "We outgrow love, like other things."

Erotic passion is not her strong point. She may feel it but it must be suppressed. Her trouble with her eyes suggests that she must not even see it.

Emily's final illness began in the fall of 1883. In June of the next year she become unconscious. In June she had another attack. Her nerves had little to do with her condition but her doctor is not to be condemned for calling it "nerves" (emotional cause). In early May she had a convulsion and developed paralysis, probably from a cerebral hemorrhage. She survived for two and one half days, dying at 6 p.m. on May 15. Her tiny figure was dressed in robes of white and placed in a white coffin that was carried out the back door of the mansion by six Irish workmen known to the family. Her grave was beside her father's and her mother's. It was a beautiful spring day.