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Unpublished correspondence with a woman named Ida, caused one late-20th century author to claim that she was a lesbian.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:
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)