Armand 23), "The Power" increasingly given to "frivolity, snobbery, and ruthlessness" (Farr 110), a "sensitive editor" who was Emily's "most responsive reader" (Eberwein 44, 131), a "remarkably ntor of some standing" who supposedly refused to edit Emily's poems for publication (Sewall 201 219). Samuel Bowles, 149), "astute and cosmopolitan" (St. Susan has been called the "most graceful woman in Western Massachusetts" (Bianchi q. Both of her sons preceded Susan in death (Gib in 1883 and Ned in 1898). Susan and Austin had three children, Edward (Ned born 1861), Martha (Mattie or Mopsy born 1866), and Thomas Gilbert (Gib born 1875). Susan's generous dowry from her brothers helped to furnish the Evergreens, a showcase with oak sideboards, a pinkish red marble fireplace adorned with Canova's sculpture Cupid & Psyche, Gothic chairs, and Victorian paintings where the young wife-to-be imagined treating her brothers to "an oyster supper some cold night" (August 1855 letter).
Though the young couple contemplated moving West, to Michigan, where Susan's older brothers lived, Edward Dickinson insured their never leaving Amherst by making Austin a law partner and by building them a made-to-order house, the Evergreens, on a lot next door to the Homestead. In 1853 she and Austin Dickinson were engaged, and then married July 1, 1856, in the Van Vranken home, "a quiet wedding," with "very few friends and brothers & sisters, a little cake a little ice cream" (Leyda 1:342).
From that time until the late 1840s, when she came to live in Amherst with her sister Harriet and brother-in-law William Cutler, Susan was reared by her aunt, Sophia Arms Van Vranken, in Geneva, New York, and attended Utica Female Academy in nearby Utica, New York.
By the time she was eleven years old, Susan was orphaned, her mother dying in 1837 and her father in 1841. Susan was the youngest of six children, born between 18 to Thomas and Harriet Arms Gilbert. 1 Born nine days after Emily Dickinson on December 19, 1830, about ten miles away from Amherst in Old Deerfield, Massachusetts, and dying May 12, 1913, almost twenty-seven years to the day after Emily, Susan and Emily have been called "nearly twins" by some (Mudge 93), and indeed they enjoyed many mutual passions for literature, especially poetry, and for gardening, recipes, music, nature. Though her intense and constant relationship with Emily Dickinson spanned five decades, forty years (from the late 1840s until the poet's death in 1886), and though Dickinson sent her substantially more writings than any other correspondent and changed at least one poem at her behest, a book-length biography of Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson (called "Susie" as a girl "Sue" as a young and middle-aged woman "Susan" in her later years) is yet to be written. SUSAN HUNTINGTON GILBERT DICKINSON, 1830-1913Ī brief account of her life.
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