Emily Dickinson never published anything under her own name

One of the interesting facts about Emily Dickinson is that Emily Dickinson never published anything under her name. Dickinson's friend and tutor Thomas Wentworth Higginson commended her writing skills and originality but advised against publishing her poetry, maybe because he believed that the general public would not be able to appreciate (or grasp) her genius. Ten of Dickinson's poems and one letter were printed in newspapers and journals between 1850 and 1878, but she did not consent to any of these publications, and her name is not given to any of them.

Dickinson may have attempted to have some of her writing published; for instance, in 1883, she submitted four poems to Thomas Niles, the editor of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Instead, she published dozens of self-published booklets of her poems after letting her closest friends see them. Four years after Dickinson's passing, her first book of poems was published in 1890.

After Dickinson passed away in 1886, her sister Lavinia discovered approximately 1,800 poems and a sizable collection of hand-embroidered volumes in her bedroom. The poet's early years were devoted to studying, reading, and writing, but between 1858 and 1865, in her late twenties and early thirties, when she only wrote about 1,100 poems, she was at the height of her creative output. It coincided with the Civil War and Dickinson's family's relocation to the Homeland, which she bitterly disliked. It was a time of relative change in her life.