Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a family well known for educational and political activity. Her father, an orthodox Calvinist, was a lawyer and treasurer of the local college. He was also a Congressman. Dickinson's mother was a religious hard-working housewife, who suffered from depression. Dickinson and her mother were distant. Later Dickinson wrote in a letter that she never had a mother. Dickinson attended Amherst Academy and around 1850 she began writing poetry. Her poems not only dealth with issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and power. Dickinson's father died in 1874. Her mother, who had a stroke, died in 1882. Emily Dickinson died at the age of fifty-five on May 15, 1886. She had suffered from Bright's disease from 1884.