[1][2] Millicent Bingham's early interest in geography was encouraged by her father, an astronomy professor at Amherst College known as an "eclipse chaser," a passion that took him around the world.

As a young woman, she accompanied him on international astronomical expeditions, traveling to the Dutch East Indies (1901), Tripoli (1905), Chile and Peru (1907), and Kiev, Ukraine (1914).

[2] In 1931, after Millicent returned from an international geographical congress in Paris, her mother revealed that she was in possession of a Chinese camphorwood chest containing more than 600 unpublished poems and letters written by the recluse, Emily Dickinson.

[1][2] By that time her mother, Mabel Loomis Todd had collaborated with Thomas Wentworth Higginson to edit and publish many Dickinson works after the poet's death in 1886.

According to archives at Yale, after her mother's death, Bingham very reluctantly[2] "abandoned her career in geography to begin what became a personal crusade to publish Emily Dickinson's manuscripts and to bolster Mabel Loomis Todd's reputation as the person most responsible for bringing Emily Dickinson's poetry to public attention.

She bequeathed an 87-acre wooded area, located on Mount Orient in Pelham, Massachusetts, to Amherst College in 1960 as the Mabel Loomis Todd Forest.

[2]  Bingham died in Washington, D.C., on December 1, 1968, at age 88 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia next to her husband, a World War I veteran.