Death of Paternal Grandmother Lucretia Gunn Dickinson
Poet involved
What happened
Emily Dickinson's paternal grandmother, Lucretia Gunn Dickinson, died on May 11, 1840, in Enfield, Massachusetts, at age 64. She had returned east after her husband's death and was later reinterred in the family plot in Amherst.
Literary impact
The death of her grandmother, coming just two years after her grandfather's passing, marked one of young Emily's early encounters with family mortality. These losses contributed to her developing preoccupation with death as a subject, though her most profound poetic treatments of the theme would come later, informed by a lifetime of such partings.
Source: Wikipedia
