Martha Dickinson Bianchi (1866–1943) was born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, next door to her father’s sister, Emily Dickinson. She was educated at several girls’ schools and at home by tutors from Amherst College, and she studied piano at the Smith College School of Music. As well as editing important editions of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters, Bianchi published novels and poems of her own and was a frequent contributor to Harper’s and the Atlantic. In 1902 she married the Russian count Alexander Bianchi; they divorced in 1920. In her later years she divided her time between New York and her childhood home, now part of the Emily Dickinson Museum.