fathers shadow and eventually became a lawyer. Austin also married Dickinson's best friend, Susan Huntington Gilbert, making her Dickinson's sister-in-law. Austin and Susan lived next door and grew to be very close to Dickinson.While in her early twenties, after two years of college, Dickinson began to write sketches of poems on the backs of recipes and used envelopes. By 1858, she started to copy her poems in ink and was gathering them in little packets loosely bound by thread. Dickinson only considered publication once in 1862 when she sent four poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a rising young man of letters, and attached a note asking if "her verse was alive", (Rupp 45). His response must have discouraged her and she never made any more attempts to publish anything. Instead, she sent her works to friends in the form of letters. These letters perplexed all of the recipients on account of their morbid connotations and the gloomy feeling they gave to the reader. Only after she died was she ever recognized as a talented poet, "She concentrated on the very essence of what she was and felt in phrases that strike and penetrate like bullets, and with and originality of thought unsurpassed in American poetry", (White 19).Although Dickinson was obviously good at heart, the townspeople did not know what to make of her. They noticed that the only color she ever wore was white and started to give her nicknames such as "The Woman in White", "The half cracked daughter of squire Dickinson", and probably the most famous "The Eccentric Recluse". Dickinson chose to deviate from society and simplified her life like Thoreau who believed that being without was a means of being with, (Nesteruk 82). Mitchell 3Dickinson grew obsessed with death and most of her friends departed. Nevertheless, she pressed on writing poems that would send chills up a reader's spine, "Many readers have been intrigued by Dickinson's ability to probe the fact of human deathShe...
