10th December 2009

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née today: Emily Dickinson
birth info: 10 December 1830 - 15 May 1886

When Thomas Wentworth Higginson urged her to come to Boston in 1868 so that they could formally meet for the first time, she declined, writing: “Could it please your convenience to come so far as Amherst I should be very glad, but I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town”.[81] It was not until he came to Amherst in 1870 that they met. Later he referred to her, in the most detailed and vivid physical account of her on record, as “a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair … in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl.”[82] He also felt that he never was “with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.”