Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson was born and raised in a conventional New England home in the Mid-Eighteenth Century. Her entire family was Christian, but she alone abandoned their religion and opposed the Church. She, like many of her peers, had rejected the rigid traditional views in favor of adopting the new transcendental perspective. This emergence of Transcendentalism, Dickinson’s restrictive home life, her refusal to conform, and the smothering control of institutional religion contributed to Emily Dickinson’s attitudes toward life, death, and spirituality. Massachusetts before the transcendental period was the center of religi