Transatlantic women writers

This essay demonstrates that some of the literature that most nourished Dickinson’s soul was written by her British female contemporaries, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot. While her response to these writers registers a “complex of attitudes,” their powerful influence on her writings and her artistic vocation is unquestionable. Whereas other contemporary women writers wrote solely for social or ethical purposes, celebrating the domestic realm, innate female morality, and ideals of femininity associated with virtuousness, piousness, and wholesomeness, Dickinson’s favorites, in their lives and in their fictional creations, aimed to challenge the valorization of the sentimental domestic sphere and of female submissiveness, passivity, and docility.