Postbellum Activities
After the Civil War, she remained one of the nation's most celebrated lyceum speakers for nearly a decade. During the time she also published one novel, What Answer (1868), that featured an interracial marriage and a book about her experiences on the lecture circuit "A Ragged Register of People, Places, and Opinions]" (1879). When her speaking career waned, Dickinson turned to the theater as both a playwright and actress. She performed as Hamlet on Broadway in 1882. In 1891, her sister, Susan Dickinson, arranged for Anna to be incarcerated at the Danville State Hospital for the Insane. After a brief stint in the asylum, Dickinson won her freedom and embarked on a series of legal battles against the people who had her incarcerated and the newspapers that had claimed she was insane. She won her court case and in retaliation the newspapers blacked out news coverage of her lectures. As a result she spent her last 40 years in relative obscurity in Goshen, New York.
Unpublished correspondence with a woman named Ida, caused one late-20th century author to claim that she was a lesbian.
Read more about this topic: Anna Elizabeth Dickinson
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“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
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