Emily Dickinson wrote nearly everything in one small room

The Homestead on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts is a brick Federal house built by Emily Dickinson's grandfather in 1813. She was born in it, spent most of her life in it, and died in it in 1886 at fifty five.

Her room is upstairs on the southwest corner. It is not large, roughly seventeen feet square. There are two windows facing south toward the street and two facing west toward her brother's house next door. There is a small square writing table, about eighteen inches on a side, set by a window.

Nearly all of her work was written at that table. Almost 1,800 poems. Fewer than a dozen were published in her lifetime, most of them anonymously and edited without her consent, which she disliked intensely.

She withdrew from the town gradually in her thirties and forties, and by the end she rarely came downstairs when visitors called. The famous image is of a woman lowering a basket of gingerbread on a rope to the children below rather than opening the door.

What that image gets wrong is how busy the room was. She corresponded constantly, hundreds of letters. She kept a herbarium of more than 400 pressed plants. She baked. She sewed her poems into small hand bound booklets called fascicles, folded and stitched with thread, and hid them in a chest.

Her sister Lavinia found them after her death and refused to burn them despite instructions to destroy her papers.

The room is preserved now with the table, a reproduction of her white dress, and the two south windows. Stand at them and you see the same street she saw.

It is a very ordinary view. That is the part that stops people. She did not need a bigger window.