Lives Like Loaded Guns

Starred review from April 19, 2010
This biography is informed by two revelations: first, a bombshell that is likely to be debated as long as there are inquiring readers of Emily Dickinson; and second, the effect of a family love affair on the poet's long and complex publishing history. When Dickinson writes “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” and punctuates her work in a spasmodic style, Gordon maintains we are privy to the neuronal misfiring of epilepsy. Gordon unearths compelling evidence: the glycerine Dickinson was prescribed, then a common treatment for epilepsy; her photosensitivity; and a family history of epilepsy. The stigma-packed condition, says Gordon, is at least one source of Dickinson's celebrated isolation. Gordon, biographer of Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft, also recounts the fallout from the affair between the poet's straitlaced, married brother, Austin, and the far younger, also married Mabel Loomis Todd. In a literary land grab, descendants of the families of Dickinson and Todd (who edited many of Emily's papers) squared off in a fight to control the poet's work and myth. Although deciphering Emily Dickinson's mysterious personality is like trying to catch a ghost, this startling biography explains quite a lot. 16 pages of b&w photos; 2 maps.

Starred review from July 1, 2010
Noted literary biographer Gordon (senior research fellow, St. Hilda's Coll., Oxford; "Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life" combed the archival record, including newly available materials, and presents a twofold thesis about her subject: first, that Dickinson's seclusion was due to an epileptic condition; second, that the question of who should manage and present to the world Dickinson's oeuvre and the details of her life has been influenced by a family feud that began in Dickinson's lifetime and continues to color scholarship to this day. The key person in this feud was Mabel Todd, who became the mistress of Emily's married brother Austin, altering the relationships among the remaining principals: Austin, Emily, their sister Lavinia, and Austin's wife, Sue. The first portion of the book, drawing extensively on Dickinson's own words put into context as explanation of her physical and mental state, is speculative and not entirely convincing as proof of epilepsy. The second part, however, on the nature and impact of the feud, is well developed and engrossing. VERDICTThis new interpretation of the poet's life is a necessary addition to all literature collections, academic and public.—Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences Lib., Philadelphia

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2010
Forever vanquished is the pallid icon of Emily Dickinson as the reclusive virgin saint of Amherst. In The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010), Jerome Charyn imagines the poet as an adventurous, sexy rebel, and now Gordon, biographer of Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft, explodes all previous theories in an electrifying family portrait. It wasnt heartbreak that kept the poet sequestered, Gordon argues with high-beam cogency, it was epilepsy, a then-uncontrollable and shameful malady. With one stroke, Gordon recasts Dickinsons entire oeuvre. She then reveals the outrageous treachery of the poets esteemed brother, Austin, who held his unmarried sisters, wife Susan, and their children hostage to his passion for his ambitious mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, whose scheming husband encouraged the affair. So much for New England decorum and restraint. With trysts in Lavinia and Emilys cherished home and sanctuary, Mabels escalating demands, and Austins utter callousness toward his family, a great feud was born. And on it raged long after Emilys death as the irrepressible, multitalented Mabel deciphered, typed, and published Dickinsons poems. Literary bloodhound and superbly eloquent chronicler Gordon follows every twist and kink of the ensuing legal skirmishes, especially the poignant battle between Mabels daughter and Emilys niece, in a Shakespearean tale of a house divided. A jolting and utterly intriguing watershed achievement.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)