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Lavinia "Vinnie" Norcross Dickinson (February 28, 1833 – August 31, 1899) was the younger sister of American poet Emily Dickinson. Vinnie was the youngest of the Dickinson siblings born to Edward Dickinson and his wife Emily Norcross in Amherst, Massachusetts. She shared a name with her Aunt Lavinia.
Lavinia Dickinson, ca. 1896. One of the most significant people in Emily Dickinson’s life was her sister Lavinia. Born two years after Emily, on February 28, 1833, the two were raised as if of an age. They began attending Amherst Academy together in the spring of 1841 at ages ten and eight, and shared a room and a bed into their twenties.
Learn about the poet's family and friends, including Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, her sister and confidante. Explore their relationships, influences, and legacies through letters, poems, and photos.
Lavinia Norcross Dickinson. Dagurreotype portrait, 1852, by J.L. Lovell. Dickinson family photographs, MS Am 1118.99b (27). Houghton Library, Harvard University. In her teen years, a wave of religious revivals moved through New England and through Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which she attended for a single year.
Lavinia "Vinnie" Norcross Dickinson (February 28, 1833 – August 31, 1899) was the younger sister of American poet Emily Dickinson. Quick Facts Born, Died ... Close. Vinnie was the youngest of the Dickinson siblings born to Edward Dickinson and his wife Emily Norcross in Amherst, Massachusetts. She shared a name with her Aunt Lavinia.
Without what Dickinson called Vinnie’s “inciting voice” (L827), we would know little or nothing of her great poetry. Emily Dickinson to Charles H. Clark (L827), mid-June 1883, in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:334. Photograph, 1896.
Emily Dickinson had two sisters, one inherited and the other acquired. The earliest was Vinnie: Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, born when Emily was two years old. The second was Sue: Susan Gilbert Dickinson, appropriated as friend when Emily was twenty, sanctioned as sister-in-law six years later. It might be said that sisterhood was with Vinnie ...
