“It puzzled women who wore sensible stuff dresses why Emily wore white the year around. Various fantastic tales were circulated about her. Sometimes such stories made us laugh; more often they made us hate the stupidity that invented them. She puzzled those people she was not just like, simply because she was not like everybody else of that day and place. ‘Self-expression’ was not in vogue in her day. It was hard to put up with in a country village. Why should she wear white? What good reason was there for her not doing exactly what everybody else did? What was she making a mystery about? And the only person who never thought of it as a mystery was Emily herself, as she moved about her father’s house and garden. They could no more approach her than they could make the moon come down and sit on their parlor sofas!”
— Martha Dickinson Bianchi on Emily Dickinson