Emily Dickinson : Writing as a Woman

Contents: Preface. Introduction. 1. The chiefest apprehension/upon my thronging mind: the woman author’s anxiety of self, subjectivity and creativity. 2. The ecstatic limit/of unobtained delight: the woman poet’s doubt and dread of unconsummated love. 3. Judge tenderly of me: the woman poet in quest of succor in nature’s tender majesty. 4. Why do they shut me out of heaven?: female ire and the poetics of the religious. 5. The morning after death/is solemnest of industries: voicing a female endurance of death. Conclusion. Bibliography. Index.

The book deals with the work of Emily Dickinson, including the letters and personal writings, one of the finest poets that not only the United States has produced, but also one that the world—in its entirely—has ever seen. The work takes into detailed account five major themes in the poetry of Dickinson and attempts to identify the anxiety of authorship that the poet experiences as a woman poet since the dared to write in an age that considered women not as artists, but only as objects of art. It thus, attempts to explore the diverse tides of life that a woman poet experiences or, in other words, that Dickinson as a poet might have experienced, since she belonged to a time that was so constraining as not to give her a literary place.