This is an accepted version of this page Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson (December 19, 1830 – May 12, 1913) was an American writer, poet, traveler, and editor.

Their marriage in the Van Vranken home on July 1, 1856, was "a quiet wedding" with "very few friends and [only Susan's] brothers & sisters, a little cake–a little ice cream.

[4][5] A generous dowry from Susan's brothers helped furnish the Evergreens, a fashionable home with oak sideboards and a green marble fireplace adorned with Antonio Canova's sculpture Cupid and Psyche, Gothic chairs, and Victorian paintings.

[14][15] She was affectionately called "Dollie" by Emily, and characterized as an "Avalanche of Sun",[16] a "breath from Gibraltar" uttering "impregnable syllables",[17] "Domingo" in spirit, and "Imagination" itself whose words are of "Silver genealogy.

[30][31][32][33] Both depictions were heavily influenced by the research of Martha Nell Smith, one of the first scholars to theorize that Susan was the love of Emily's life.

[38] She published several stories in the Springfield Republican—"A Hole in Haute Society" (August 2, 1908),[39] "The Passing of Zoroaster" (March 1910),[40] and "The Circus Eighty Years Ago" (early 1900s).

[41] In January 1903, writing from Rome, Susan published a lengthy review of "Harriet Prescott's [Spofford] Early Work" as a letter to the editor of the Republican.

Arguing for republication of Spofford's early work, she quotes "my sister-in-law, Emily Dickinson" as an authority, reiterating the latter's delighted reader's response—"That is the only thing I ever saw in my life I did not think I could have written myself.

[42] In Annals of the Evergreens, a typescript that was not published until the 1980s, Susan praises Prescott's "Pomegranate Flowers" at the outset, then proceeds to describe an Evergreens life rich in cultural exchange, reading Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Thomas de Quincey, Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Carlyle, and Shakespeare, and entertaining many distinguished visitors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist Wendell Phillips, landscape designer Frederick Olmsted.

"[44] In a March 1891 letter to Ward, she elaborated on her vision for such a volume which would also include Emily's "illustrations", "showing her witty humorous side, which has all been left out" of the 1890 Poems.

Susan's outline for the volume shows that she would not have divided the poems into the conventional categories of "Life", "Love", "Time and Eternity", and "Nature" but would have emphasized poetry's integration with quotidian experience.

Though more conventional in form than Emily's, Susan's poems attend to many of the same subjects–"There are autumn days of the Spring" distinctly echoes both "These are the days when Birds come back"[47] and "The Crickets / sang / And set the / Sun",[48] and "The Sun kept low as an oven" recalls the "Stooping as low as the / kitchen window – " of "Blazing in Gold – and / Quenching – in Purple!