Emily and Others

As the subtitle of Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns indicates, the book is as much about the family as it is about Emily Dickinson and the controversies involving her papers. It begins with an identification of the people involved and an overview of the Homestead, where the poet spent much of her life. Family background leads to an account of Dickinson's education and a loose narrative of her life centering on what have become the "talking points" of most Dickinson biographies: her friendship with Susan Norcross Dickinson; The Master behind "The Master letters"; her recurrent mysterious illness; the love for Judge Lord; and her brother's affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, which resulted in the family split that influenced both the ways her poems and papers have come down to readers and her depictions in biographies. Gordon is excellent at characterizing the court cases and intrigues which, after Todd's early efforts at organizing, publishing, and popularizing the poems, gave ownership of the poet's work to Lavinia Dickinson. The resulting rancor led to partial portraits of the poet that this biographer seeks to remedy.

Gordon sees the friendship between Susan and Emily as "imaginative love," finding no evidence that Dickinson "put same sex love into practice." She dismisses Charles Wadsworth and Samuel Bowles as candidates for "The Master," noting that Dickinson's placing "The Master letters" with the poetry rather than the correspondence suggests he was largely invention. On the basis of visits to Dr. James Jackson in 1851, Gordon hazards that Dickinson's unnamed illness was epilepsy and uses it to explain references to "fits" and the use of dashes in the poems, her never marrying, the "unromantic reason" for her wearing white, the role of Lavinia, and the collapse of her relationship with Judge Lord. The Todds' arrival in Amherst is cited as inaugurating the dissensions that have colored the poet's biography. Mabel seeks to insinuate herself into the Dickinson world by replacing Susan in Austin Dickinson's feelings, wheedling from him property that becomes The Dell, and convincing Lavinia to let her edit, with Thomas Higginson, the first volume of Dickinson's poems. It is Lavinia's sense of exclusion that prompts her bringing suit against Mabel, and the battle between Lavinia and Mabel continues through Susan's daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi; and Millicent Todd Bingham, the daughter of Mabel and David Todd; and more recently between Millicent and Gilbert Montague, distant cousins of the poet.

Gordon envisions the poet as strong-willed, brilliant, and, like her father, controlling. In the religious revival that swept Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary while the poet was there, she resisted being coerced into professing beliefs she did not hold, and later she opposed her brother's dealings with Mabel. Gordon, likewise, sees a strong ego in the poet's sending her work out to friends "as a way of binding them to her as a circle of readers," noting that, in contrast to the usual character of personal letters, hers, while "wonderfully imaginative and amusing," do not reflect the personalities of their recipients. Whereas Susan is "admitted to intimacy," Mabel and Higginson are treated to her "most riddling manner," prompting Austin to say of the "little me" letters: "Emily definitely posed for them." Gordon goes on to explain the burst of poems between 1860 and 1863 as due not to the appearance of a master but to a denial of and response to the dissolving circle of early readers through departures and marriage. Encouraged by Helen Hunt Jackson, Emily is, moreover, bold enough to send a manuscript of poems to Roberts Brothers and meet with a representative of Dodd, Mead, and Co. Additional support for an explosive and passionate nature are found in poems and the letters to Judge Lord.

Gordon is a masterly storyteller who understands the value...