Field trip: She Dwelt in Possibility (and This House)
A Visit To The Newly Restored Emily Dickinson Museum In Amherst The recently restored Homestead, c. 1813, part of the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts. Photograph by Patrck Fecher. All photographs courtesy of the Emily Dickinson Museum. Emily Dickinson’s butter-colored brick home in Amherst, Massachusetts, began drawing the curious long before her enigmatic poetry appeared in print. What some early visitors most wanted to glimpse was not the pale, elegant, reclusive author, scribbling on paper scraps at her tiny worktable, and wondering when death would kindly stop for her. They just came for the floor coverings. The parlor’s Brussels carpeting with flower basket motifs “enjoyed a reputation of its own,” Emily’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi recalled in a 1932 memoir.* Martha wrote that in mid-November 1882, when the funeral of Emily’s long-invalided mother was held at home, “two old ladies came an hour ahead of the service” just to admire the luxurious carpet in the empty room, “before the mourners broke up the pattern.” The Homestead’s south parlor. Photograph by Jon Crispin. This summer, wool bouquets have been unfurled underfoot again at the Emily Dickinson Museum, as part of a multiyear restoration of the several buildings on the three-acre compound. The staff has re-created the Dickinsons’ lively palette based on archival wisps, architectural ghosts, and family heirlooms, incorporating Victorian furniture donated by the makers of Apple TV+’s Dickinson comedy series, which ran from 2019 to last year. Emily’s writings have also inspired the decor. In every room, household objects allude to lines in her poems. Replica of Dickinson’s worktable. Fecher photograph. The poet’s gabled, cupola-topped house, known as the Homestead, was built in the early 1810s