Visiting Emily Dickinson at Her Home
Text & Photos by Neil Soderstrom

Emily Dickinson homestead. Now part of the Emily Dickinson Museum, second floor left held Emily's bedroom, Lavinia's at right. First floor left to right were the parlor, front entrance and central stairway, the library, and the dining room, formerly covered by Emily's small conservatory. Most of the right side of the house is now a Museum Shop and administrative offices.

Amherst, Mass., 15 May 1886: Accomplished baker, cook, pianist, gardener, and nature observer; witty conversationalist and letter writer; adored and adoring intimate of family, friends, and her large Newfoundland dog of 17 years, Carlo; devoted reader of Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; brilliant poet herself—though virtually unpublished—Emily Dickinson died at age 55 in the “Homestead” of her birth, where she lived most of her life with her parents and younger sister, Lavinia.

Although Emily Dickinson is universally regarded as one of America’s greatest poets, fewer than a dozen of her poems were published in her lifetime—all submitted, without her approval, by family and friends.

On her deathbed, Emily instructed sister Lavinia to destroy all of her poems and all letters she’d received. The grieving Lavinia was surprised to find 1,775 poems in Emily’s bedroom (nearly all of the 1,789 known today). Emily had bound several hundred of these poems into booklets by means of string. Others were on loose pages, along with Emily’s drafts of letters some never sent.

Lavinia honored Emily’s request to destroy incoming letters, but she could not bring herself to destroy Emily’s poems, many still in draft form. Nor did Lavinia destroy Emily’s letter drafts, which often included poems.

Lucky for us.

Living Quarters
For her first ten years, Emily and her family were tenants in just the eastern half of the south-facing Homestead (shown) that grandfather Samuel Dickinson had built but was forced to sell because of debts. The young family endured cramped quarters before purchase of a large wood-frame house about two blocks away. There, when home from school, Emily, Lavinia, and 18-month-older brother Austin enjoyed their teens and early 20s. They gardened, explored nature, cared for pets and barn animals, and enjoyed family life.

In 1855, when Emily was in her mid-20s, father Edward repurchased the 14-acre Homestead with barn, carriage house, and fields—essentially an independent farm. During the family’s absence, the original symmetrical Federal Style architecture had acquired Greek Revival porch columns, ornamental molding, and a high gable roof. To this, father Edward added Italianate features then in vogue: a parapet to the front portico, ochre paint over the original bare-red brick, and a small-paned glass conservatory (now torn down) off the study (at right in the photo). Also important, Edward added a cupola from which Emily could view the countryside for miles in all directions. Emily shed tears of gratitude within this cupola when, after a frightening period in her 30s when she couldn’t tolerate daylight, her eyesight returned to normal, allowing her to read Shakespeare there.

Homestead Life
Biographer Alfred Habegger describes father Edward Dickinson as a strict Puritan, uncommunicative and reserved. While in college, Edward had argued that Scripture made man “lord of creation” and woman “subject to the man,” who expected obedience while providing protection. When the children were still small, Edward presented Mother with a copy of The Frugal Housewife; its eventually well-worn pages suggest frequent consultation.

With schooling ended in their mid-teens, Emily and Lavinia assisted Mother as homemakers and gardeners. But aside from cooking and baking, which Emily seemed to enjoy, she despised other housework, saying she preferred “pestilence.” Meanwhile, visits from the occasional suitor did not result in marriage.

In those days of wood-fired cook stoves and hand-pumped water, food preparation chores dominated the day. In the kitchen at the back of the house, Emily excelled in baking and dessert making. Father favored Emily’s breads over all others, making these first lines from an Emily poem especially poignant: God gave a loaf to every bird, /But just a crumb to me.

The Dickinson Museum offers a booklet called Profile of the Poet as Cook, with Selected Recipes. Emily often treated her niece, nephews, and neighborhood children to her baking, including gingerbread, which she lowered by means of a knotted cord from her bedroom window, hers being those at left on the second floor in photo.

In later life, Emily began wearing a white cotton house dress like this reproduction by Adrienne Saint-Pierre, courtesy Emily Dickinson Museum. Easily washed and bleached, such dresses were fairly common during Emily's time, hers with a pocket to hold pencil and paper.

Father didn’t ban alcohol. The family recipe for multiple loaves of black cake called for 1/2 pint of brandy. As to spirits by the glass, the Dickinsons enjoyed sherry, as well as wines made from their own grapes and currants. When asked to send a photo of herself to her Boston mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily instead described herself, noting that her eyes were the color of “sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves.”

From early childhood, Emily loved plants and gardening, reinforced by botany courses at Amherst Academy. There she learned how to identify flowers by their scientific genus/species names, based on flower structure. She also collected local wildflowers and pressed them before mounting and labeling them in a large 66-page leather-bound book she called her “Herbarium.”

She loved gardening indoors and out. In winter, she forced hyacinth bulbs on her bedroom windowsills, the fragrance filling the second floor. The small conservatory allowed her to bring the tropics to Amherst, as Marta McDowell mentions in her marvelous Emily Dickinson’s Gardens, focusing entertainingly and instructively on Emily’s gardening through the year, a subject we’ll address in an upcoming issue of AboutTown.

Roughly 100 miles east of the Hudson River in Amherst, Massachusetts, the Emily Dickinson Museum is open to visitors March through December. You’ll find a wealth of information, as well as books and DVDs at emilydickinsonmuseum.org. Neil Soderstrom is glad to have rediscovered Emily, her eccentricities unfortunately often made sport of by teachers who should know better.