Susan Huntington Gilbert was born December 19, 1830 in Old Deerfield, Massachusetts, the youngest of six children, born to Thomas and Harriet (Arms) Gilbert. She was orphaned by the time she was eleven years old, after her mother died in 1837 and her father in 1841. From that time until the late 1840s, when she came to live in Amherst with her sister Harriet and brother-in-law William Cutler, Dickinson wrote essays, reviews, journals, poems, letters, and memorials constantly throughout her life and produced commonplace books and scrapbooks of her own publications in the Springfield Republican, as well as of clippings about admired figures such as Queen Victoria, and of favorite poems, essays, and stories of other writers, including Emily.