Lives Like Loaded Guns - Emily Dickinson and Her Friends & Family's Feuds

By LYNDALL GORDON
Published by Virago in TPB on 1 March 2010 / RRP $39.99

This bold new biography of Emily Dickinson dismantles the sentimental legend that has grown up around the reclusive US poet.

The commonly told story of this great poet – who published only ten poems in her lifetime, but left behind 1,789 poems – is that of a pathetic recluse, disappointed in love, who shrank from publication. Lyndall Gordon believes to the contrary: that for most of her life Emily Dickinson was very much in control of her life and her poetry.

Lyndall Gordon’s Dickinson is a volcanic character who demonstrated unashamed physical response to an older man and was challenged only by her brother’s mistress. Drawing on previously untapped papers, the biographer’s intuitive exploration offers extraordinarily intimate access to the leading figures on both sides of the feud (including a seemingly forgotten deposition by the Dickinson sisters’ servant which bears witness to the adulterers using the poet’s house for their assignations) and also restores the reputation of Susan Dickinson, the poet’s ‘Sister’ (her sister-in-law) and her keenest reader.

Lyndall Gordon tells the story of Emily Dickinson’s legacy and genius through the lens of the family feud that continued over three generations, into our own time. After the poet’s death, the rage over the adultery became a battle as to who would possess Emily Dickinson’s poetry: who and how she would be presented to the world. This is the first book to draw on previously unseen correspondence with an obsessed agent, millionaire donor, Harvard curator, and certain well-known publishers. For the first time, the entire story of the feud, from all points of view, is told.

At the heart of this book about sex, scandal and betrayal is a poet whose astonishing fame was entirely posthumous. Lyndall Gordon the acclaimed biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft, T.S. Elliot, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf and Henry James has written a brilliant and powerful book that rewrites the legend of this great poet and draws us back into her explosive genius.
 
 

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