Lives Like Loaded Guns - Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds by Lyndall Gordon ✔✔✔✔

The author of this remarkable biography was interviewed on CBC the day before the book was released, and I was so intrigued by the title, plus the story of these feuds, that I wasted no time in purchasing the book. I only started reading it this past summer, in between several others I was enjoying, and I finally came back to it this week to finish it.

I'm not even certain the book can be described as a biography - I guess it's a literary biography of the Dickinson family and the other families who were involved - and in many ways it seems to operate more as a literary thriller. The title of the book, taken from one of Emily's 1789 poems, more than aptly describes the families and their feuds, and I often felt I was reading a novel. These were flesh and blood creatures for sure, including Emily - the typical view of her as a recluse in a white dress, shy and retiring, is not accurate. The recluse part is, to be sure, but not the rest of it.

I've chosen one of Lyndall Gordon's paragraphs to sum up the book:

"Emily Dickinson is now recognised as one of the greatest poets who ever lived, yet her life remains a mystery. She continues to be encased in claims put out by opposed camps fighting for possession of her greatness. These camps originated in the clash between Austin Dickinson ( Emily's brother) and his wife, who had been the poet's intimate and her keenest reader. Out of this feud, a lasting feud developed, and it was the opponents in this feud, their allies and warring descendants, who devised the image of the poet as her fame grew and endured. What began as a split over adultery turned into a feud over who was to own the poet: in the first instance, who was to have the right to publish her works; in the second, whose legend would imprint itself on the public mind."

Gordon has written other bios: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and Charlotte Bronte.