How a TV Show Brought New Fans (And Furniture) to Emily Dickinson’s House

Writers’ houses have long attracted passionate fans. While sites like Ernest Hemingway’s cat-filled Key West home and Edith Wharton’s Berkshires estate, The Mount, are often billed as places of historical and architectural interest, literary house tours are also sites of fan tourism, places that let readers feel emotionally—and physically—connected to an author they love, in the spaces where they worked as well as lived.

But few writers are as closely associated with their homes as Emily Dickinson, on the page and in the popular imagination. The poet spent most of her life in a stately yellow house on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts; famously, she rarely left the property in the later decades of her life. “She is arguably the poet for whom ‘home’ is the most important,” says Brooke Steinhauser, Senior Director of Programs at the Emily Dickinson Homestead. Dickinson’s 1,789 known poems are deeply connected to the natural world just outside her door, and underscored by a very specific sense of place—her home. “This is the backdrop,” Steinhauser tells me while we chat in her office at the Homestead on a beautiful late-summer afternoon. “This is the studio.”

The Homestead has been owned by Amherst College since the 1960s, and it formally opened as a museum two decades ago; today, it’s a loving restoration of the place where the poet lived and worked circa 1855. In Dickinson’s bedroom, reproductions of her signature white house dress and cramped writing desk are set against a cheerful floral wallpaper based on original fragments. The bold carpet in the parlor was rewoven after curators cross-referenced a description in a visitor’s letter with contemporary catalogs from the manufacturer. And the copy of a newspaper—the Springfield Republican—sitting prominently on the table? That, my tour guide, Carla Carpenter, informs me, is “from the show.”

The Dickinson Homestead today is fielding fans from a new source. The house is dotted with items from Dickinson, which aired on Apple TV+ from 2019 to 2021. Starring Hailee Steinfeld as the titular poet, Dickinson was an early hit for the streamer, earning a Peabody Award and positive acclaim from critics—particularly those who were charmed by the show’s pairing of anachronistic, modern language with deeply researched historical production details. It’s those details that are on display in the house, seamlessly woven in amongst items collected by the Homestead’s own staff, that creates a space that truly feels lived-in.

Dickinson fan tourism began more than a century ago. When her poems were published posthumously in the 1890s, they were immediately popular, and in the early decades of the 20th century, admirers began to travel to Amherst to see the place that gave her work life. In 1915, the Homestead was sold to another family, but the Evergreens—the grand Italianate mansion Dickinson’s father built for her brother, Austin, next door—remained in family hands. It was Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Dickinson’s niece and an early editor of her poems, who first set up the “Emily Room” in the Evergreens, featuring items like the Dickinson family cradle and her aunt’s writing desk, for “pilgrims” who made the trek. “I like to call it the first Emily Dickinson museum,” says Steinhauser. Bianchi had a literary—and legal—interest in reminding the public of her connection to her aunt, and Steinhauser says she saw creating this space as helping to preserve the family’s legacy.

Amherst College eventually purchased the Homestead itself, intending for it to be faculty housing. It was Jean McClure Mudge, the wife of religion and philosophy professor Lew Mudge, who was responsible for initially setting up the house where Dickinson actually lived as a place to welcome her pilgrims. As a scholar in her own right, living in the same space as the poet led Mudge to study her from the inside out. “Occupying Dickinson’s house, I wondered what living here so constantly and so long meant to her,” Mudge wrote in 2013. “By her late 30s, she announced with some surety, ‘I do not cross my father’s grounds to any house or town.’ Deeply inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, she had become his solitary scholar-poet at home. How did her work reflect that fact?”

With other artists, it can be harder to identify where they produced their works, and what inspired them. Not so with Dickinson, says Carla Carpenter at the conclusion of our tour. “This is it. This is where Emily Dickinson wrote her poetry.” she tells me, gesturing to the house and grounds. Her Dickinson fandom, she says, has only increased in her time working there, as has her sense of the poet in the physical space. “Seasonally, you see a certain bird, or you see a bee, or the snow comes,” she says. “And you think about a snow poem, or you read a piece of history in Amherst, and wonder about her connection to that piece of history.”

Perhaps ironically, a lot of recent interest in Dickinson came not because others could physically enter her space, but because they were getting intimately acquainted with their own four walls. When the Homestead pivoted to virtual programming during the pandemic, Brooke Steinhauser says, “we pretty immediately started seeing numbers for programs that we could never realize on-site, and registrations from 90 countries.” Dickinson’s timing was similarly fortuitous, with the first season coming out only a few months before lockdown; the Homestead, which had already worked with the cast and crew on pre-production research, was able to collaborate with them once again on virtual programming for fans, opening up the historical figure to a whole new audience.

That audience started to physically make their way to the site when it reopened in the summer of 2022—and Steinhauser notes that tour guides now receive a lot of questions about Dickinson. “What do you personally think about the show? Was this thing really true? Is this an Apple TV+ piece of furniture?” That last question underscores just how much the show’s props and furniture add to the space—the set of barrister’s bookshelves in the library, for instance, an item Dickinson’s attorney father would have owned, with piles of bound papers visible through its glass front. Steinhauser says the museum hopes to continue to add contemporary items and furniture themselves, and to stage more tableaus that give a real sense of the family that lived there. “I think the true feeling of a home is in the little stuff,” she says, and Apple TV+’s gift of all that little stuff shortly before the museum reopened “happened at the perfect time.”

This melding of history and historical fiction is a perfect encapsulation of the broad tent of Dickinson fans. Dickinson herself has meant many different things to readers over the years. In the gift shop, there are items that feel almost like nods to the “pilgrims” of her early fandom, especially the Emily prayer candles with that famous photograph of her—the only one that’s known to have survived—done up with saintly robes, a bejeweled crown atop her head.

“We like to say that everybody who identifies as a fan who’s coming through our doors has their own Emily Dickinson,” Steinhauser says. “They encountered her poetry in school, or they stumbled across her during the pandemic—because there were all these memes about her as a ‘Queen Recluse’—or they watched Apple TV+, and they loved the idea of a gay Emily Dickinson, and they want to connect with that.” (The show embraces the theory held by some scholars that Dickinson and Sue Gilbert—Dickinson’s closest friend, the recipient of many of her poems, and the eventual wife of her brother, Austin—were lovers.)

Visitors bring these different versions, Steinhauser says, “wanting to touch something of that, and it’s our very difficult job to meet them wherever they are, with whatever version of Dickinson they have connected with, and try to walk with them a little further down the road with whatever knowledge we can provide to them.”

Walking through the rooms of the Homestead, it’s very easy to feel connected to a version—to many versions—of Emily Dickinson, who once framed poetry itself as a house of infinite dimensions:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

“Her work remains so contemporary,” Carla Carpenter tells me, as we stand at the top of the path connecting the Homestead to the Evergreens, looking out over the same landscape that Dickinson drew so much inspiration from. “It never feels old. And I think that’s why the TV show works, too—because there’s this contemporary energy about 194-year-old Emily Dickinson.”