Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds
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.
4.7 out of 5 based on 11 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Literary Studies & Criticism |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
512 |
| RRP |
£20.00 |
| Date of Publication |
February 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-1844084531 |
| Publisher |
Virago |
| |
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.
Reviews
The Financial Times
Olivia Cole
"It is testament to Gordon’s subtlety that this sensational new discovery [she alleges the poet suffered from epilepsy] doesn’t imbalance her original thesis – to look at Dickinson through the relationships with the only society her “soul” could select: her closest family, and the society forced on her in the form of her brother Austin’s lover, Mabel Todd... a worthy monument to a poet even more extraordinary than we realised."
08/03/2010
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The Literary Review
Claire Harman
"Explosively revisionist... One of the big surprises for me in this book was the emotional recklessness of Dickinson's passions for the newspaperman Samuel Bowles, for the unidentified 'Master' of three surviving love letters and for Judge Lord, the widower she almost married in her late forties... Lyndall Gordon has opened the way to an entirely new reading of Dickinson's life with this brilliant tale of turbulence both on and off the page"
08/03/2010
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The Scotsman
Ronald Frame
"The Dickinson genius, courtesy of Gordon's dexterity, survives the hazards of "biographical contexts". Here is the definitive biography. At any rate it will be the Last Word for the next few decades."
08/03/2010
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The Spectator
Sam Leith
"Gordon’s project in this book is to unpick the knots and tangles of these competing myths. She does it brilliantly. She rescues Sue’s reputation from malign posterity, puts that jezebel Mabel — albeit not ungenerously — in her place, and most important, cuts through the cutesy cant that has cast Dickinson as demure, passive and unworldly."
08/03/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
"Given the sane and sensible woman who emerges from this biography, how did the legend of the Amherst belle develop? This is where Gordon’s biography really sparks into life… As Gordon tells it, this story of the terrible fascination Dickinson exerted on her heirs is as rich as a novel by Henry James."
08/03/2010
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The Times
Jeanette Winterson
"This biography is not about taking sides, nor does it claim “truth” in any absolute way. Its questioning intelligence is a real pleasure and, as always with Gordon, the writing flows. It is a biography that compels without being sensational, quite a feat considering the material, with its twists, curves, lies, deliberate distortions and well-intentioned concealments."
13/02/2010
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The Sunday Times
Frances Wilson
"Lives like Loaded Guns will shake up an already formidable body of work on Dickinson and her family. The affair between Mabel and Austin, previously seen as a touching love story, becomes the stuff of nightmares, and Gordon brilliantly shows how the subsequent feud determined Dickinson’s legacy as a poet. If she was invisible before, Gordon in this book gives Emily Dickinson the startling clarity of one of her own poems."
08/03/2010
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The New Statesman
Sarah Churchwell
"Gordon does an admirable job of bringing much-needed objectivity to the tale, but does have her own axes to grind, most saliently her dislike of Mabel Todd. Determined to read Dickinson in familial contexts, Gordon also implies that the poet was sufficiently reclusive to miss the war that split the country during the years of her greatest productivity… Perhaps no writer will ever fully catch the “Biographied", but Gordon has come closer to the fleeing Emily Dickinson than any other biographer yet."
08/03/2010
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The Guardian
Elaine Showalter
"Oxford professor Lyndall Gordon brings the advantage of distance and a fresh and tough-minded perspective to her fascinating study... [She] does not take on the history of modern criticism of Dickinson's poems, but her book, by clearing away much that is speculative, projected, or contentious about the life, will open the way for new approaches to the woman she calls "the poet next door"."
08/03/2010
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The Independent
Helen Taylor
"The problem for this biography is that Emily dies halfway through the book, and begins to fade in memory as the least interesting of the dramatis personae. The woman whose complex life emerges most vividly is Mabel Loomis Todd, the flamboyant, mendacious, ambitious and ruthless mistress and editor in her stylish black hat surmounted by two white birds' wings. Emily herself becomes the backdrop for a thrilling story of literary battle."
08/03/2010
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The Sunday Telegraph
Caroline Moore
"This is not a flawless biography. There is too much strained writing: a book collector is described as a 'piranha’ swimming into a quiet pool; though the curator of the library, obviously a piranha-whisperer, is able to 'calm his lashing tail’. This is a shame, because straining is unnecessary. This book is unforcedly and powerfully original."
08/03/2010
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