Emily Dickinson was a nineteenth-century American woman who lived her life completely unknown to anyone except her family and a few friends. Less than a dozen of her poems were published during her lifetime. In spite of this, she is regarded today as a great poet, perhaps the greatest poet the United States has produced. Along with the Greek poet Sappho, she may be one of the two greatest women poets who have ever lived. Dickinson was born on December 10,1830, in a small Massachusetts town called Amherst. Hers was an old family, and her ancestors had come to the United States 200 years before' Her parents were not really rich, but they were certainly not poor. She had an older brother, Austin, and a younger sister, Lavinia. Her parents seem to have been rather withdrawn people, and the members of the family spent a good deal of time by themselves. She doesn’t seem to have liked her mother very much. She spoke once of never really having a mother. She was educated at the local Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Women’s Seminary. Although she was sometimes described as pretty, she never married. In all outward respects, her life appeared to be rather boring. The time and place in which she lived was not a good one for a woman artist to succeed. Women are expected to be obedient to men and to remain in their place at home. Rather than waste her life in the meaningless round of social events that were open to women, she decided at some point to retreat from the world in order to write her poetry. From then on, she spent a great deal of time in her bedroom writing. In later years when she was standing in front of her bedroom door, she looked at her niece and said, 'It’s just a turn --and freedom, Mary !' It was when she closed the door of her room and turned the key that locked the door that the most important and creative hours of her life were spent, the hours when she wrote her poetry. She was regarded as a recluse by many of her neighbors, that is, as a person who spent a good deal of time by herself. According to the writer, who is the greatest woman writer in America?