Lives Like Loaded Guns
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""Lives Like Loaded Guns."..reads like a fabulous detective story, replete with hidden treasure, diabolical adversaries and a curse from one generation to the next...Gordon is fair to all...revealing their strengths and liabilities, and she corrects some of the inconsistencies of earlier biographies..."Abyss has no biographer," Dickinson warned future readers. But Gordon is not frightened of the pits and traps and the thousand masks that Emily wears. She takes us into undiscovered territory."
-"The Washington Post "
"Fascinating...[Gordon] shatters the Dickinson myth, revealing for the first time the twisted tale of how Dickinson came to be revered as "a harmless homebody shut off from live to suffer and contemplate a disappointment in love...".Brilliant literary detective work...Uncovering the mystery of why the mischievous, sensible creature who emerges from this biography hid from the world is where Gordon hits her stride...Gordon catches the poet's essence, allowing u
-"The Washington Post "
"Fascinating...[Gordon] shatters the Dickinson myth, revealing for the first time the twisted tale of how Dickinson came to be revered as "a harmless homebody shut off from live to suffer and contemplate a disappointment in love...".Brilliant literary detective work...Uncovering the mystery of why the mischievous, sensible creature who emerges from this biography hid from the world is where Gordon hits her stride...Gordon catches the poet's essence, allowing u
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Emily Dickinson is regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time, but she has come to us as an odd and helpless woman living a life of self imposed seclusion. Lyndall Gordon sees instead a volcanic character living on her own terms and with a steely confidence in her own talent; a woman whose family feuded over a hothouse of adultery and devastating betrayal and a woman who had her own secret. After her death the fight for possession of Emily and her poetry became the feud's focus. 'Lives Like Loaded Guns has cracked one of poetry's most enduring enigmas ...It rescues Dickinson from the image of the passive, heart-broken recluse. It is a worthy monument to a poet even more extraordinary than we realised' Olivia Cole, Financial Times From the acclaimed biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft, T.S. Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf and Henry James.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book is not just about the poet, it has a far wider range than that. It is about Emily Dickinson, her family and what happened to her work after she died. Emily lived next door to her brother, Austin, and her beloved sister in law, Sue. However, when Austin had an affair with Mabel Todd, it tore his family apart. Emily became a myth, in some ways, and her poetry used in a war of revenge between the 'Sue' camp and the 'Mabel' camp. This is a fascinating book, although some of the conclusions the author comes to are not completely substantiated. However, it is a very interesting read and I recommend it highly. As Emily is best known as a recluse, it was interesting to read some actual reasons why she might have lived like that, although I was not necessarily convinced completely by the authors arguments.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Ok, a short review.
The first half of this book is an intelligent, almost academic, study of Dickinson's life and poetry. The second half is a Heat magazine ready expose of the sexual shenanigans of her brother and his lover. This is followed by an account of the repercussions of this affair for Emily's legacy.
Brilliant!
The first half of this book is an intelligent, almost academic, study of Dickinson's life and poetry. The second half is a Heat magazine ready expose of the sexual shenanigans of her brother and his lover. This is followed by an account of the repercussions of this affair for Emily's legacy.
Brilliant!
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Lyndall Gordon's account of Emily Dickinson's life takes the revisionist view. She dispels the popularly held belief that Emily was a slightly mad loner, shy and chaste, whose only commitment was to poetry, by placing her centre stage in an eccentric family wrought with tangled relationships. But this is a book that is not only about Emily's life, it covers also the machinations in and around the Dickinson family that took place long after her death.
Emily's's devotion to her writing caused her to become more reclusive (though Gordon suggests another reason for this) and she laboured at it for years, unrecognised and unacknowledged by the outside world. It was only within the family that she had a forum - at salons in her brother Austin's house, where her sister-in law Susan used to recite the poems on her behalf.
A regular visitor to the salons was one Mabel Todd, a young married woman. Mabel saw the genius in Emily's work and, sensing an opportunity to promote this talent, sought to get to know her by way of having an adulterous relationship with Emily's brother Austin. She tried for five years - incidentally the last five years of the poet's life - but Emily would not meet with her.
After Emily's death, a cache of her poems was found. Mabel set about gaining access to them, and did so by persuading Austin to make the other Dickinson sister, Lavinia, hand them over to her in order to get them published. However there was competition regarding how the work should be presented to the public in the person of Susan, who was in effect Emily's choice as `the keeper of her flame' and who had a collection of poems given to her by Emily. Thus the scene was set for a bout of rivalry between Mabel and Susan over Emily's two-part legacy.
Then there was the matter of a family feud, the details of which take up most of the second half of this enthralling book, when Mabel claimed the right to a strip of land on the Dickinson estate as recompense for her efforts to bring Emily's work to a wider audience. On this, and the abovementioned rivalry, the author is even-handed with her treatment of the approaches of Mabel and the Dickinson family members.
However the controversy rolled on; the two adversaries, Mabel and Susan being superseded by their daughters, who each produced a book about Emily, with the conflict coming to a head in the 1950s over the sale of the Dickinson papers.
The author has trawled the comprehensive archives relating to the Dickinson family and has come up with an account of the poet's life that brings the content of her poems more clearly into focus than has hitherto been the case, as well as attending to the Dickinson family's tribulations with meticulous detail.
Emily's's devotion to her writing caused her to become more reclusive (though Gordon suggests another reason for this) and she laboured at it for years, unrecognised and unacknowledged by the outside world. It was only within the family that she had a forum - at salons in her brother Austin's house, where her sister-in law Susan used to recite the poems on her behalf.
A regular visitor to the salons was one Mabel Todd, a young married woman. Mabel saw the genius in Emily's work and, sensing an opportunity to promote this talent, sought to get to know her by way of having an adulterous relationship with Emily's brother Austin. She tried for five years - incidentally the last five years of the poet's life - but Emily would not meet with her.
After Emily's death, a cache of her poems was found. Mabel set about gaining access to them, and did so by persuading Austin to make the other Dickinson sister, Lavinia, hand them over to her in order to get them published. However there was competition regarding how the work should be presented to the public in the person of Susan, who was in effect Emily's choice as `the keeper of her flame' and who had a collection of poems given to her by Emily. Thus the scene was set for a bout of rivalry between Mabel and Susan over Emily's two-part legacy.
Then there was the matter of a family feud, the details of which take up most of the second half of this enthralling book, when Mabel claimed the right to a strip of land on the Dickinson estate as recompense for her efforts to bring Emily's work to a wider audience. On this, and the abovementioned rivalry, the author is even-handed with her treatment of the approaches of Mabel and the Dickinson family members.
However the controversy rolled on; the two adversaries, Mabel and Susan being superseded by their daughters, who each produced a book about Emily, with the conflict coming to a head in the 1950s over the sale of the Dickinson papers.
The author has trawled the comprehensive archives relating to the Dickinson family and has come up with an account of the poet's life that brings the content of her poems more clearly into focus than has hitherto been the case, as well as attending to the Dickinson family's tribulations with meticulous detail.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
'Opinion is a flitting thing, But Truth, outlasts the Sun - ...'
A captivating, fascinating, meticulously researched, and revealing book. But almost as revealing of its author's predilections as of her subject. Read more
Published 12 months ago by R. C. Ross
See Emily Play
This is an extremely good biography, which looks at Dickinson through the lens of the feud between her family and Mabel Loomis Todd, the lover of Emily's hypocritical brother... Read more
Published 13 months ago by J. H. Bretts
Emily Dickinson
This is the best and most readable biography that I have read in recent years apart from "Hunting the Unicorn" by Don King which describes the life of that should have been 20th... Read more
Published 18 months ago by The Doctor
Savour every word
The quality of the research and writing in this luminous biography is superb - but when you open a book by Lyndall Gordon you are also sure of a work that is uniquely writerly. Read more
Published 21 months ago by stevie davies
The diagnosis of epilepsy is based on misunderstanding of pharmacology
Lyndall Gordon's biography of Emily Dickinson is operatic in scope (John Adams, take note). But equally dramatic is her diagnosis of epilepsy, based almost entirely on a... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Norbert Hirschhorn
Gripping story but no closer to knowing ED
I don't think it's the fault of the biographer that, after reading this book, one feels no closer to understanding Emily Dickinson. Read more
Published on 2 May 2010 by M. Stewart
Brilliant new biography of the genius New England poet.
This is the first biography I've read of Emily Dickinson and I was bowled over. Lyndall Gordan is a superb writer and the story is always enthralling. Read more
Published on 3 April 2010 by Charliecat
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