Austin Dickinson was Emily's beloved younger brother. Like his father and grandfather before him, he too became a lawyer, but, it is possible that Austin lacked some of the rigid Congregationalist morality so evident in his father's character. Austin Dickinson married a rather pretty and intellectual woman named Sue Gilbert. The later years of their marriage were stormy to say the least, primarily because Austin fell in love and very likely conducted a torrid affair with this woman Mabel Loomis Todd, who was eventually to be instrumental in making Emily Dickinson famous.

The youngest of the three Dickinson children was Lavinia. Like Emily, she never married and lived a spinster all of her life. It was the idiosyncratic Lavinia, called Vinnie by her brother and sister, to whom was left the decision whether Emily's legacy of poems ought to be published after her death, and incredibly, after turning to Austin's wife Sue Dickinson unsuccessfully for help with the laborious task of editing the roughly 1800 poems Emily left behind, it was eventually to Austin's mistress Mabel Loomis Todd's credit that she undertook the task of collecting, editing and publishing Emily's work.

In an ironic twist of fate, it can be argued that were it not for Austin's weakness of character, Vinnie's peculiarities, Sue's jealousy, and Mabel Loomis Todd's twin obsessions for fame and Austin Dickinson, all working together in combination, Emily's destiny -- whether posterity would remember her as one of Amherst's local crackpots or a world class poetic genius -- was almost a matter of pure chance, right up to the very last second. Emily would have liked that. Emily liked paradoxes.