[3] On September 7, 1840, Vinnie and her sister Emily started attending school at Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that had opened to female students just two years earlier.

[4] Vinnie was instrumental in achieving the posthumous publication of her sister's poems after having discovered the forty-odd manuscripts in which Emily had collected her work.

Despite promising her sister that she would destroy all correspondence and personal papers, Vinnie sought to have her sister's poetry edited and published by two of Emily's personal correspondents, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd.

Four years after Emily Dickinson's death, in 1890, Poems was published by Roberts Brothers, Boston.

[5][6][7] Vinnie never married, and remained at the Dickinson Homestead until her death.