Serious odds against (Cotter)

She knew the work she wanted to do; there were serious odds against her doing it, social and personal. At some point she realized, emphatically, that she had to create a place of absolute concentration, where no distractions stood between her and her work, where no talk interfered with the new language she was inventing; where she could ignore the knock on the door, refuse the callers, control access.

She was well aware that she was putting herself outside the range of normality. But I never had the impression that she yearned to be inside it. Just the opposite.

Holland Cotter on Emily Dickinson