Dickinson received an education at Amherst Academy and attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house, and living in isolation most of her life, especially in her later years when she rarely left even her bedroom. She did, however, correspond with acquaintances through letters, and she was a prolific writer of
Poems. In her lifetime she wrote over 1800 poems, although fewer than a dozen were published before her death in 1886 at the age of fifty-five. After her death her younger sister Lavinia discovered her huge cache of poems, and the first collection was published in 1890 by acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, although the content was heavily edited. The first mostly complete and unaltered collection The Poems of
Emily Dickinson, was published in 1955 by scholar Thomas H. Johnson.
