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Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds
Lyndall Gordon
#UE4692
Paperback, 491 pages; 2011 (2010)
$18.00
 Members' Price: $15.30
In 1882, Emily Dickinson's brother Austin betrayed his wife of twenty-six years (who was an intimate friend of the poet) to pursue Mabel Todd, a young Amherst faculty wife who would become enthralled with Austin's reclusive sister and her visionary work. This scandalous affair sparked a dramatic schism within the Dickinson family. Eventually, the feud resulted in different sides laying claim to the poet's unpublished papers after her death, and a battle to control the poet's legacy raged for generations. Drawing upon letters, diaries, autobiographies, and legal documents, award-winning biographer Lyndall Gordon deconstructs the long-held perception of Dickinson as a cold and demure spinster, instead revealing a passionate creative genius pulled apart by family drama and suffering from a secret illness, which Gordon (somewhat controversially) posits is epilepsy. Lives Like Loaded Guns is a groundbreaking literary biography that's as enthralling as it is revealing.
(AG)
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