The secret passions of Emily Dickinson revealed
New York Post By Barbara Hoffman January 21, 2017
For someone so notoriously reclusive, Emily Dickinson got around. She wrote heartfelt letters to both men and women, clipped flowers and magazine articles, and spoke her mind, at least in poems.
Only 10 were published, anonymously, in her lifetime — out of around 1,800 discovered in her bedroom after her death in 1886. Fiercely private and prolific, she’s long been a mystery: the woman in white, gardening by moonlight. So it’s thrilling to see hard evidence of her life, right down to a lock of her auburn hair, at the Morgan Library & Museum’s new show, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson.”
Nearly 100 letters, photos, books and artifacts that rarely leave Amherst College and Harvard University’s archives are finally on view here, including a lovely family portrait of a 9-year-old Emily, with her older brother, Austin, and younger sister, Lavinia. There’s even a musket used by Amherst students, who aimed to join the Union soldiers during the Civil War, and whose shooting drills Emily probably heard from her bedroom. And while the Morgan’s left a few copies of her poems to leaf through during the show, you’ll probably end up wanting to read more. This is shaping up as a great year for the “Belle of Amherst,” who never married and died, age 55, in the home in which she was raised: In April, we’ll see Cynthia Nixon play her in the film “A Quiet Passion.”
