Kate Scott Turner

• Name — Kate Scott Turner • Birth Name — Catherine Mary Scott • Born — 12 March 1831 • Birthplace — Cooperstown, New York, U.S. • Died — 1917 • Place of death — England • Illustration — In September 2012, the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections unveiled this daguerreotype, proposing it to be Dickinson and her friend Kate Scott Turner (c. 1859); it has not been authenticated.

Catherine Mary ("Kate") Scott was the daughter of Henry Scott of Cooperstown, New York. She attended the Utica Female Seminary, where in 1848 she met Susan Gilbert, who married Emily Dickinson's brother Austin Dickinson. The women remained friends until Susan's death in 1913. In 1855, she married Campbell Ladd Turner, who died in 1857 of tuberculosis. Turner was acquainted with Emily Dickinson through Susan, and they remained so until the mid-1860s. Turner married for a second time in 1866 to John Hone Anthon, who died eight years later. She died in 1917 in England, having lived most of her life outside of the United States.

She met Emily Dickinson in 1859. From that time until about 1862, Dickinson sent her four poems. One poem was sent with a pair of garters that Dickinson had knitted for her: