Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds [Hardcover]

'This book is unforcedly and powerfully original' --Sunday Telegraph

'Gordon takes the lid off the violent emotional life of the Dickinson family and its far-reaching effects on the poet's work. What she exposes is a seething PEYTON PLACE of adultery, betrayal and lifelong feuding . . . An entirely new reading of Dickinson's life with this brilliant tale of turbulence both on and off the page' --Literary Review

'As rich as a novel by Henry James. There is the same complexity of motives, the same grim comedy . . . "Tell the truth but tell it slant" was Dickinson's advice to herself . . . Perhaps for the first time since Dickinson's death, she invites us to meet the poet head-on' --Daily Telegraph

Though in her lifetime only ten of Emily Dickinson's poems were published, her death revealed 1,789 poems, many of them in hand-sewn booklets, secreted in a locked chest. She is now regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time, but she has come down to us as a woman disappointed in love, an odd and pathetic woman who dressed in white and shut herself away. Lyndall Gordon sees instead her volcanic character - 'a soul at White Heat' - a mystic and lover whose family harboured a hothouse drama of sex, scandal and devastating betrayal. Emily Dickinson was a woman beyond her time who found love, spiritual quickening and immortality all on her own terms: she wrote 'My Life had Stood - a Loaded Gun'. Here is an explosive genius.

Lyndall Gordon is the prizewinning author of biographies including CHARLOTTE BRONTE, VIRGINIA WOOLF, SHARED LIVES and MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. Born and raised in South Africa, Lyndall is a fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford.