Born in 1830 in rural Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson spent her entire life in the household of her parents. Between 1858 and 1862, it was later discovered, she wrote like a person possessed, often producing a poem a day. It was also during this period that her life was transformed into the myth of Amherst. Withdrawing more and more, keeping to her room sometimes even refusing to see visitors who called, she began to dress only in white - a habit that added to her reputation as an ...

Born in 1830 in rural Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson spent her entire life in the household of her parents. Between 1858 and 1862, it was later discovered, she wrote like a person possessed, often producing a poem a day. It was also during this period that her life was transformed into the myth of Amherst.

Withdrawing more and more, keeping to her room sometimes even refusing to see visitors who called, she began to dress only in white - a habit that added to her reputation as an eccentric.

In their determination to read Dickinson's life in terms of a traditional romantic plot, biographers have missed the unique pattern of her life - her struggle to create a female life not yet imagined by the culture in which she lived. Dickinson was not the innocent, lovelorn and emotionally fragile girl sentimentalized by the Dickinson myth and popularized by William Luce’s 1976 play, The BeIle of Amherst. Her decision to shut the door on Amherst society in the 1950's transformed her house into a kind of magical realm in which she was free to engage her poetic genius. Her seclusion was not the result of a failed love affairs but rather a part of a more general pattern of renunciation through which she, in her quest for self – sovereignty, carried on an argument with the Puritan fathers, attacking with wit and irony their cheerless Calvinist doctrine, their stern patriarchal God, and their rigid notions of "true womanhood."

What is the author's main purpose in the passage?