Few American writers are more intimately connected to a single house than Emily Dickinson was. Apart from brief trips to Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., the reclusive Dickinson did not stray far from her comfortable two-story residence in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she wrote nearly 2,000 poems. Only a handful were published in her lifetime, and all anonymously. The house, known as the Dickinson Homestead, and its contents—every sherry glass, quilt, and doll’s slipper—were the locus of her imagination. For Dickinson, the domestic and the literary form one seamless line. Last week, a public database cataloging all those family objects—more than 8,000 of them—went live. The unparalleled collection has been assembled by the Amherst-based Emily Dickinson Museum and stored in an undisclosed warehouse in Western Massachusetts. For the past year, museum staffers have unpacked, identified, stabilized, and photographed the items for future researchers. What this major offering won’t reveal is the circuitous, acrimonious story of who guarded the trove, and how it nearly disappeared.

The Evergreens in Amherst, Massachusetts (Courtesy of the Emily Dickinson Museum).

Upon Dickinson’s death, in 1886, her sister, Lavinia, entered the poet’s room in the Homestead to clean out her effects. She was astonished to find sheet upon sheet of verse, some bound together with string, tucked away in a bureau. The family knew that Dickinson wrote poetry and had corresponded with a few writers and editors, but they had no idea how many poems she had produced. Vinnie asked Susan Dickinson, her sister-in-law, to help sort the verse for possible publication. Susan lived next door at the house called the Evergreens with Austin Dickinson and their children. She delayed, and Vinnie became impatient.

Vinnie then asked a neighbor, Mabel Loomis Todd, the artistic and ambitious wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor, for assistance. Todd agreed to help and enlisted the support of the poet’s longtime literary mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a writer Dickinson had reached out to after reading his work in The Atlantic Monthly, where he was a frequent contributor. The two went to work, transcribing the poems, making editorial decisions about word choice, adding titles, standardizing punctuation, and organizing the verse by theme. In 1890, Todd and Higginson produced the first volume of Dickinson’s poetry and introduced her to the world. Much to the dismay of Vinnie and Susan, Mabel Todd refused to return Dickinson’s manuscripts and kept poems in her possession for future editions. Mabel’s resistance was not unexpected. She was Austin Dickinson’s not-so-secret lover, and their relationship ignited a fury on all sides that smoldered for generations.

Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Courtesy of the Emily Dickinson Museum).

Mabel and Susan each held on to manuscripts in their possession and did not budge. Austin died in 1895, followed by Lavinia, and then by Dickinson’s two surviving nephews (one had died earlier). When Susan died, in 1913, the poet’s niece, Martha Dickinson, became the sole descendent of the family, the heir to the Homestead and the Evergreens, and the custodian of everything inside, including embroidered door portieres and literary manuscripts. Organizing her aunt’s verse was not work she sought. Martha had literary aspirations of her own and felt trapped by family obligations. “I was on my way to becoming a writer,” she was known to say, “when I was forced to become a niece.”

Maintaining ownership of the Evergreens and the Homestead proved difficult. In 1902, on a trip to Bohemia, Martha married Alexander Bianchi, a captain in the Russian Imperial Horse Guards and a businessman who claimed to be a count. Now calling herself Madame Bianchi, Martha and the count returned to Amherst with his creditors banging at the door. After realizing that the count had bilked her, Martha divorced her husband and barely managed to circumvent moneylenders who sought to seize the two Dickinson properties. Needing further financial stability, Martha sold Emily Dickinson’s home and moved all of the family possessions across the lawn from the Homestead to the Evergreens. She left Dickinson’s clutter unsorted.

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Bianchi’s sense of family duty eventually outweighed her paralysis. She needed help reviewing her aunt’s literary manuscripts, especially because she wanted to publish her own editions of Dickinson’s work. Martha Bianchi had spent time at the National Arts Club in New York City, where she had become friendly with Alfred Hampson, a professional tenor, who shared her love of music and travel, and visited the Evergreens often; she called him “too old to adopt and too young to marry.” Bianchi asked for his assistance with the Dickinson manuscripts, and he agreed. The two excavated mountains of material and found letters to the poet tucked in closets and cupboards, and more than 250 poems that Dickinson had sent to Susan. With the new material, Bianchi and Hampson edited multiple volumes of Dickinson’s poems and letters. They were terrified, though, that a fire might incinerate Dickinson’s work still in the house and discussed offering the poet’s manuscripts to an archive: any place except Amherst College, where the poems in Mabel Todd’s possession eventually found a home.

As she neared death, in 1943, Bianchi knew she had to make a plan. She waffled on the direction to take, at times thinking the house should be sold, turned into a cultural center, or perhaps even torn down. She feared it might become a teahouse or a dormitory for Amherst College students. The idea of the Dickinsons’ legacy “smothered in Foot Ball memorabilia”—as she wrote—repulsed her. In her last will and testament, Bianchi bequeathed the Evergreens and all of its contents to Alfred Hampson, and instructed that after he—and any future heir—had died, the house was to be razed. She wanted the Evergreens, with all of its old memories, bitterness, and ghosts, “taken down to the cellar.”

Hampson solicited the advice of a rare-books dealer, and the Dickinson manuscripts in the Evergreens went to Harvard. He made good, too, on another of Bianchi’s suggestions—or directives: He married one of her old friends from the National Arts Club. An intelligent and quick-witted woman, Mary Landis was an alumna of Smith College, where Bianchi had studied music. Her marriage in 1947 to Hampson was not without its challenges. By then, Hampson had a serious drinking problem and suffered from hepatitis. He also had a propensity for getting into hot water. He wrote a letter to the Springfield Republican in praise of fascism and Mussolini (“Viva Mussolini!” he exclaimed) and became the serial target of grifters, including a father-daughter pair who had their hands in Hampson’s finances and their eyes on the Evergreens.

[Emily Dickinson: “Glory”]

Mary Landis Hampson (Courtesy of the Emily Dickinson Museum).

In fact, Landis finally agreed to marry Hampson to keep him out of trouble. Completing the transfer of the Dickinson manuscripts to Harvard in 1950 provided the couple with a much-needed cushion; Alfred’s medical bills kept mounting. Two years later, he died in Paris of cirrhosis of the liver. Armed with the instructions in Bianchi’s will, Mary Landis Hampson called herself the “unworthy emissary” of Emily Dickinson and all the family possessions. She took the responsibility seriously. She was fiercely devoted to Bianchi, disdained Todd, and—for the next 36 years—lived alone in the Evergreens without so much as replacing the family furniture, the iron cooking stove, or the drooping wallpaper.

In her later years, Mary became friends with two Brown University professors, Barton Levi St. Armand and George Monteiro. As scholars of American studies and English, they recognized the historical importance of the Evergreens and its contents. Mary spent hours with them, arguing that Bianchi was the real literary genius in the Dickinson family. Concerned that Bianchi would not receive her rightful place in history, Mary earmarked boxes of Bianchi’s correspondence, family photographs, and books to be housed in special collections at Brown University. It would be neutral territory—neither Harvard nor Amherst. She scribbled notes and attached them to objects, noting where she found what and how Bianchi described them. But however much she revered, perhaps even loved, Bianchi, Mary could not agree to tear down the Evergreens.

Emily Dickinson’s fame had exploded, and the Homestead—sold to Amherst College in 1965—had been opened to tourists. Mary knew the Evergreens had increased in importance too. When she died, in 1988, her final will contested Bianchi’s on the grounds that the Evergreens’ cultural significance needed to be preserved. Two years later, the Hampshire County probate court ruled in Mary’s favor, and the Evergreens became the property of the newly formed Martha Dickinson Bianchi Trust, overseen by St. Armand and Monteiro.

After decades of neglect, the Evergreens needed repairs to keep it from collapsing. The roof leaked, the foundation was unstable, and rot had spread throughout the house.

Once construction workers stabilized the premises, Gregory Farmer, a historic preservationist, turned to the objects inside. He photographed every room, window, door, and wall to record how it looked when Austin and Susan lived there. He also found thousands of books from the Dickinson family’s library, sheet music, sermons, funeral programs, Mabel and David Todd’s 25th-wedding-anniversary program, Alfred Hampson’s clippings on fascism and Mussolini, and many unidentified photographs. Rumor had it that Farmer was so meticulous in his dig that he sifted through fireplace ash to determine whether poems had been burned. “That’s right,” he told me. Although most of the fireplaces had been cleaned long ago, one still contained ash, and Farmer carefully culled through the char. “No poems or Dickinson letters,” he said. “Just some of Mary’s old bills.”

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The historian Jane Wald followed Farmer as the trust’s director and continued to scour the cellar, attic, and the Evergreen’s distinctive campanile tower. The Bianchi Trust and Amherst College negotiated a merger, and the Evergreens and the Homestead combined to become the Emily Dickinson Museum, with Wald as executive director. In 2019, the museum received a major grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to finally do the work it had long sought to complete: to inventory, catalog, photograph, and better preserve its enormous collection. Trucks full of the house’s effects soon arrived.

At first glance, the contents in the 1,800-square-feet warehouse space where the objects reside appear orderly, if overwhelming. Wicker chairs, antique lamps, and hundreds of archival boxes are stacked floor to ceiling. Inside each box is a hodgepodge of items—things such as a flabby hot-water bottle and Dickinson’s father’s purple wallet. Two museum staffers had the job of sorting through all the boxes, recording initial descriptions, carefully photographing multiple angles of each object, and compiling the database.

Now that the cataloging process is complete, the museum will bring in a curator to conduct the historical and contextual research necessary to identify each object more thoroughly. Down the road, the Dickinson Museum hopes to construct a building to showcase objects for its thousands of annual visitors. The database is a method of “lifting the lid,” as Wald describes it: It offers a chance for Dickinson scholars and historians to find new links between the poet’s domestic world and her literary imagination. Take these tantalizing objects: Inside a box were unfinished quilt blocks backed with scraps from discarded letters. The torn paper stiffened dozens of red, gold, and blue silk blocks waiting to be stitched into a quilt. A word or two peeked out from the letters tucked inside: we might, nine, and the unmistakable first letters of a last name: Dickinson.