The trembling spinster in the gloomy bedroom is one of the most durable characters in American literary history, and almost none of it survives contact with the record. Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst into local royalty: her grandfather helped found Amherst College, her father served in Congress, and the family's Calvinism meant living under permanent moral surveillance. Her father also insisted his daughters get a real classical education, so she studied Latin, geology, botany, and mental philosophy at Amherst Academy. She came out of it with the tools of systematic observation. Then a close cousin died of typhus when Dickinson was a teenager, and death stopped being a tragedy to her and became a puzzle she would work on for the rest of her life.

In 1845 a religious revival swept Amherst. Friends, peers, and family stepped forw ...