Dickinson Family Funeral Home and Crematory of Holmen
"With the exception of Shakespeare, you have told me of more cognition than whatsoever ane living. To say that sincerely is strange praise"
– Emily Dickinson to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, about 1882 (L757)
Susan Dickinson, north.d.
Susan Huntington Gilbert was born on December 19, 1830, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the youngest of seven children of Thomas and Harriet Arms Gilbert. After the death of her mother in 1835, she was raised with her sisters in Geneva, New York, by her aunt Sophia van Vranken. Every bit a daughter of sixteen she visited Amherst, where her eldest sis resided, and attended Amherst Academy during the summer of 1847. Thereafter she attended Utica Female person Academy in New York through 1848, then returned to Amherst for the balance of her life. Susan was a vivacious, intelligent, and cultivated adult female, a great reader, a sparkling conversationalist, and a book collector of broad-ranging interests. Belatedly in life she traveled in Europe several times earlier her death from centre disease on May 12, 1913.
In 1850, Susan and Austin Dickinson, the poet's blood brother, began courting. They announced their engagement on Thanksgiving Day in 1853 and were married three years later on on July 1, 1856. At their newly-built dwelling, The Evergreens, next door to the Homestead, Susan enjoyed entertaining friends and the numerous literary figures attracted to the boondocks, such equally Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the early on years of Austin and Susan's matrimony, Emily Dickinson would frequently visit The Evergreens and bask the company she found there. Susan and Austin had three children: Edward ("Ned"), born in 1861; Martha, born in 1866; and Thomas Gilbert ("Gib"), born in 1875.
The Evergreens was the setting for 2 family tragedies. After a time, Austin and Susan's marriage gradually deteriorated, and in the fall of 1882 Austin began a thirteen-yr matter with Mabel Loomis Todd that caused swell rancor and bitterness within the family. Then, in the fall of 1883, 8-twelvemonth-old Gib, love of all the family, died of typhoid fever. The child's death crippled both houses, leaving Susan desolated and the poet ill for weeks.
Susan had become close friends with Emily Dickinson in 1850. Their intimate correspondence, occasionally interrupted past periods of seeming estrangement, nevertheless lasted until the poet's death in 1886. Susan, a author herself, was the most familiar of all the family members with Dickinson's poetry, having received more than 250 poems from her over the years. At least in one case she offered constructive criticism and advice. Susan wrote the poet's remarkable obituary, which appeared in the Springfield Republican on May 18, 1886. Afterwards the poet's death, her sis Lavinia asked Susan to edit the poems for publication. Lavinia soon grew impatient with Susan'due south tiresome editorial pace, nevertheless, and transferred the poems into the hands of Mabel Loomis Todd, who published three volumes during the 1890s with the aid of Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Susan'south friendship helped expand the poet'due south horizons, and their sharing of books and ideas was a vital component of her intellectual life. In her later days, Emily Dickinson wrote to Susan, "With the exception of Shakespeare, you accept told me of more knowledge than any 1 living. To say that sincerely is strange praise" (L757).
Further Reading:
Dickinson, Susan H. "Annals of The Evergreens." Writings by Susan Dickinson, ed. Martha Nell Smith et al. http://www.emilydickinson.org/susan/table_of_contents.html. Original manuscript at Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Dickinson, Susan H. "Obituary of Miss Emily Dickinson." Springfield Republican, May 18, 1886. Reprinted in The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, ed. Jay Leyda, Vol. II, New Oasis: Yale University Press, 1960, 472-474.
Longsworth, Polly. Austin and Mabel. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Printing, 1984. 67-124.
Mudge, Jean McClure. "Emily Dickinson and 'Sister Sue.'" Prairie Schooner 52 (1978). xc-108.
Smith, Martha Nell. "Susan and Emily Dickinson: their lives, in letters." The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Ed. Wendy Martin, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Printing, 2002. 51-73.
Source: https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/susan-huntington-gilbert-dickinson-1830-1913-sister-in-law/
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