11 Fascinating Facts About Emily Dickinson

6. The identity of the man Dickinson loved is a mystery.

Dickinson never married, but her love life wasn’t completely uneventful. In the three “Master Letters,” written between 1858 and 1862, Dickinson addresses “Master,” a mystery man with whom she was passionately in love. Scholars have suggested that Master may have been Dickinson’s mentor, a newspaper editor, a reverend, an Amherst student, God, or even a fictional muse. Nearly two decades later, Dickinson started a relationship with Judge Otis Lord, a widowed friend of her father’s. Lord proposed to the poet in 1883, didn’t get an answer, and died in 1884.

7. Dickinson may have suffered from severe anxiety.

Historians aren’t sure why Dickinson largely withdrew from the world as a young adult. Theories for her reclusive nature include that she had extreme anxiety, epilepsy, or simply wanted to focus on her poetry. Dickinson’s mother had an episode of severe depression in 1855, and Dickinson wrote in an 1862 letter that she herself experienced “a terror” about which she couldn’t tell anyone. Mysterious indeed.