The popularity of Emily Dickinson's poetry has always been bound up with interest in her unconventional life. In her lifetime she was the focus of town gossip and this speculation continues today: about her mental health, her beliefs and her sexuality. It was only when Emily Dickinson died aged 55, and the nearly two-thousand poems she wrote mostly on scraps of paper, began to be discovered, did it become clear that beneath the plain nondescript white dress, was a truly revolutionary artist, and a woman who refused to live by society’s rules.