The marriage of Austin Dickinson to Susan Huntington Gilbert in 1856 expanded Dickinson’s world, providing another family home just across the lawn and, ultimately, a niece and two nephews to dote upon. The early years of Austin and Sue’s married life at The Evergreens were a time of much socializing for the poet, though largely within a chosen inner circle of close family and friends. Dickinson wrote in a letter to family friend Elizabeth Holland, “They say that ‘home is where the heart is.’ I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings.”
Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Holland (L182), January 20, 1856, in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 1:323.
