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These Fevered Days

Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

Martha Ackmann

$27.95

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English
Norton
27 August 2021
On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, ?

All things are ready? and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely ?at home? (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson's interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was hesitant about publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer.

In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson's life through ten decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet. Ackmann follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, which prefigured her lifelong ambivalence toward organized religion and her deep, private spirituality. We see the poet through her exhilarating frenzy of composition, through which we come to understand her fiercely self-critical eye and her relationship with sister-in-law and first reader, Susan Dickinson. Contrary to her reputation as a recluse, Dickinson makes the startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, writes anguished letters to an unidentified ?

Master,? and keeps up a lifelong friendship with writer Helen Hunt Jackson. At the peak of her literary productivity, she is seized with despair in confronting possible blindness.

Utilizing thousands of archival letters and poems as well as never-before-seen photos, These Fevered Days constructs a remarkable map of Emily Dickinson's inner life. Together, these ten days provide new insights into her wildly original poetry and render an ?enjoyable and absorbing? (Scott Bradfield, Washington Post) portrait of American literature's most enigmatic figure.

By:  
Imprint:   Norton
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 211mm,  Width: 140mm,  Spine: 23mm
Weight:   266g
ISBN:   9780393867534
ISBN 10:   0393867536
Pages:   336
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Martha Ackmann, author of These Fevered Days, Curveball, and The Mercury 13, writes about women who have changed America. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Ackmann taught a popular seminar on Dickinson at Mount Holyoke College and lives in western Massachusetts.

Reviews for These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

Martha Ackmann is a rare scholar. She is steeped in her subject's work, but also fills her book with the light and sounds of Dickinson's home. Dickinson is at once the most mysterious and yet most accessible of American poets, and she led what has been called the most remarkable unremarkable life in American letters. Ackmann does justice to this creative paradox in her warm and stirring book. -- Cullen Murphy - The Atlantic


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