Awards

• Long-listed for Plutarch Award 2021

Overview

On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, ?All things are ready? and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely ?at home? (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson's interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was hesitant about publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson's life through ten decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet. Ackmann follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, which prefigured her lifelong ambivalence toward organized religion and her deep, private spirituality. We see the poet through her exhilarating frenzy of composition, through which we come to understand her fiercely self-critical eye and her relationship with sister-in-law and first reader, Susan Dickinson. Contrary to her reputation as a recluse, Dickinson makes the startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, writes anguished letters to an unidentified ?Master,? and keeps up a lifelong friendship with writer Helen Hunt Jackson. At the peak of her literary productivity, she is seized with despair in confronting possible blindness. Utilizing thousands of archival letters and poems as well as never-before-seen photos, These Fevered Days constructs a remarkable map of Emily Dickinson's inner life. Together, these ten days provide new insights into her wildly original poetry and render an ?enjoyable and absorbing? (Scott Bradfield, Washington Post) portrait of American literature's most enigmatic figure.

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9780393609301

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Reviews

Martha Ackmann is a rare scholar. She is steeped in her subject's work, but also fills her book with the light and sounds of Dickinson's home. Dickinson is at once the most mysterious and yet most accessible of American poets, and she led what has been called the most remarkable unremarkable life in American letters. Ackmann does justice to this creative paradox in her warm and stirring book. -- Cullen Murphy - Vanity Fair

For those intrigued by Emily Dickinson's elusive interior life, gifted storyteller Martha Ackmann deciphers with fresh and compelling insights ten transformational moments in the development of the poet's mind. These Fevered Days invites us into the experiences that led Dickinson to assert her ambitions as an artist and decisions as a poet with a vivid immediacy rare among biographical works. -- Jane Wald, executive director, Emily Dickinson Museum Martha Ackmann's These Fevered Days is a contemplative, sometimes lyrical effort to unlock several of the most important moments of Emily Dickinson's mysterious life. The book brings readers deeply into Emily's world: the sights she sees from the window of her room, the people with whom she corresponds, the sounds of daily life on the streets of nineteenth-century Amherst. Weaving together numerous sources...Ackmann's narrative provides thoughtful insights into both the poet and her craft. -- Julie Dobrow, author of After Emily Using an ingenious device to capture the whole of Emily Dickinson's life by presenting it in ten distinct tableaux, Martha Ackmann illuminates the poet from her first word as a toddler, 'music,' to her final written ones, 'called back.' In These Fevered Days, the author describes a gift from Dickinson to a friend as 'exquisite, tender, and intimate,' words that aptly describe Ackmann's latest triumph. -- Madeleine Blais, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of To the New Owners

Author Information

Martha Ackmann, author of These Fevered Days, Curveball, and The Mercury 13, writes about women who have changed America. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Ackmann taught a popular seminar on Dickinson at Mount Holyoke College and lives in western Massachusetts.

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