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Unpublished correspondence with a woman named Ida, caused one late-20th century author to claim that she was a lesbian.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
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“Love and work are viewed and experienced as totally separate activities motivated by separate needs. Yet, when we think about it, our common sense tells us that our most inspired, creative acts are deeply tied to our need to love and that, when we lack love, we find it difficult to work creatively; that work without love is dead, mechanical, sheer competence without vitality, that love without work grows boring, monotonous, lacks depth and passion.”
—Marta Zahaykevich, Ucranian born-U.S. psychitrist. “Critical Perspectives on Adult Women’s Development,” (1980)