We Dickinsons:  The Life of Emily Dickinson as Seen Through The Eyes of Her Brother Austin By Aileen Fisher and Olive Rabe is a 246-page hardcover from Atheneum, published by McClelland & Stewart, Ltd., 1965, stated first edition. The dust jacket is in poor condition, with a large tear down half the spine and chips along the edges.  The book is in very good condition, with clean crisp pages, tight binding and the most minor bumping to the edges. 

Book Summary

When Emily Dickinson withdrew from the society of Amherst, Massachusetts, a light went on in her room that burned until her death in 1886.  She was writing poems--hundreds upon hundreds of poems--that her sister Vinnie later discovered stuffed in a bureau drawer.  During her lifetime, no one had guessed at the magnitude of her output.

Emily's outer world was bound by the edge around the Homestead on Main Street and filled with her books and the flowers from her garden and conservatory.  But as she became more involved with her creative inner life, her white-clad figure in the garden became a rare sight.  There was the writing to be done, and the light burned.

So illusive is Emily Dickinson's solitary life, that only in the poems and letters, in effect the light she cast on the members of her family and friends, were the biographers able to find the living person:  the child growing up with an active and close knit family; the young woman following, at first, the conventions of life in the small New England town; and, always, the poet whose inner vision saw the rarest images in the world she finally shut out.