The daughter of a successful lawyer, Emily Dickinson was born and died in Amherst, Massachusetts. Although a bright and sociable child, it appears she suffered a grave blow in around 1862 - probably rejection by a lover - and thereafter became a morbid recluse, rarely leaving her home. Outwardly reticent, her brief poems express a passionate inner life. Her poems are genuinely unique, riddling, elliptical, full of compressed imagery and punctuated for large part by a snowstorm of dashes. Now recognised as one of America's greatest poets, during her lifetime only seven out of over a thousand lyric poems produced in a brief flurry of creative activity in the 1860s were ever published.