Emily Dickinson's poems were edited by her brother's mistress, and her sister sued the mistress for a strip of land

After Emily Dickinson died, her sister Lavinia found hundreds of unpublished poems^†. Mabel Loomis Todd, the lover of Emily's brother Austin, edited the first published volumes in the 1890s^†. Austin gave Todd a strip of meadow next to her house. After Austin died in 1895^†, Lavinia signed a deed confirming it^†, then sued to get the land back. The case came to trial on 1 March 1898. The court held that the deed, which Lavinia had signed without understanding, was void, and ordered the Todds to pay trial costs of $49.55. A scholarly study in American Literature says Lavinia perjured herself repeatedly to regain property that had been legally conveyed. After the trial Todd kept a large part of Emily's manuscripts and considered herself owed for her work. For decades the poems were split between two hostile camps. The Todd papers went to Amherst College and the family's to Harvard^†.