Amherst: A Novel by William Nicholson, and: Miss Emily by Nuala O’Connor, and: The Heart Has Many Doors: A Novel of Emily Dickinson by Susan Snively (review)

As these recently published works demonstrate, Emily Dickinson continues to inspire novelists both in the United States and abroad. Generally speaking, I enjoy fiction in which the poet figures as an important character. I am usually able to do so even when an author offers a biographical interpretation that I do not share or that is distorted by factual errors. William Nicholson, Nuala O’Connor, and Susan Snively all take imaginative liberties with the poet’s portrayal in constructing their narratives, albeit with differing outcomes. O’Connor’s Miss Emily and Snively’s The Heart Has Many Doors: A Novel of Emily Dickinson are elegantly written; their narratives, lively; their portraits of Dickinson, complex and compelling. By contrast, I found Nicholson’s Amherst: A Novel disappointing, especially in light of the author’s blog post claim that the book was “in some ways . . . [his] love letter” to Dickinson, whose poetry had fascinated him for over forty years.

The overarching plot of Amherst: A Novel focuses on Alice Dickinson, a 20-something British copywriter whose ambition is to become a screenwriter. Alice has developed an interest in Emily Dickinson’s poetry because she shares both the poet’s last name and her habit of secretive writing. When a producer invites her to submit a screenplay for his review, Alice decides to write about Austin Dickinson’s affair with Mabel Loomis Todd or, as she puts it, “Adultery in Amherst . . . sex and poetry” (6). She journeys across the Atlantic to do research in Amherst “where it all happened” (7). Alice is hopeful that during her visit to America she will find a proper ending for her story since she has been instructed by Jack, who teaches writing and was once her boyfriend, that “all [good] stories are defined by their endings”(16). What she cannot know is that, once in Amherst, she will follow Mabel’s example and begin a passionate love affair with a significantly older, married man — in Alice’s case, an Amherst College professor and longtime womanizer named Nick Crocker.

Nicholson structures his novel around these parallel love stories, alternating chapters that relate Alice’s experiences before, during, and after her trip to Amherst with chapters that chronicle the stories of Austin and Mabel’s love affair until Austin’s death and, to a lesser extent, Mabel’s editing of Dickinson’s poems. The story of the Austin Dickinson-Todd affair is well-known to the poet’s readers and unnecessary to retell here. Nicholson’s most affecting writing occurs in his imagined scenes between the nineteenth-century lovers. Of course these sections are also the ones for which the author heavily depends for his details on outside sources, especially Polly Longsworth’s Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd. Placed side by side with the original, the contemporary romance Nicholson develops seems banal and contrived, as when Alice and Nick recite and debate the meaning of Dickinson poems as sexual foreplay.

Framing the narrative and interspersed throughout are short chapters that read as if they were excerpts from Alice’s finished screenplay. In these, Dickinson makes cameo appearances and ostensibly “directs” the Austin-Mabel romance and then “oversees” Mabel’s editing of her poetry. In a final ghost-like appearance, Emily visits Mabel just before the latter dies: her purpose being to say thank you. Why the Dickinson character is so portrayed, we learn, reflects Alice’s revised strategy for her screenplay, a change in focus to highlight, not the relationship of Mabel and Austin, but that of Mabel and Emily. As Alice explains to Jack near the novel’s end, “. . . I’m making Emily be the driving force [in the love...