A different sort of Emily Dickinson, epileptic too

Emily Dickinson
and Her Family's Feuds

By Lyndall Gordon

Viking. 512 pp. $32.95

Among a spate of biographical and fictional works about Emily Dickinson pouring forth this year is Lives Like Loaded Guns, Lyndall Gordon's volcanic replay of the Dickinson family feud, the famous "war between the houses," which resulted in the most bizarre debut of any major figure in American literature.

In titling her novelistic biography, Gordon, a noted British biographer, has selected the first line of Dickinson's most elusive riddle poem, poem 754, "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun," as the embracing metaphor for the powerfully controlled life she conceives Dickinson to have designed for herself. It serves, too, for the poems and letters the poet wrote, for a secret new disease Gordon has decided she suffered, for the ferocious two-generational family warfare that broke out posthumously over her poetry rights, and even for suppressed evidence in a subsequent lawsuit.

Volcanoes and gunshots erupt regularly in this action-packed drama. Only a biographer as skilled as Gordon could have written three books in one without forfeiting her readers' rapt attention. Loaded Gun begins with a bold reassessment of Dickinson's character. No longer a touch-me-not, within these pages she is brash, secretive, eruptive, scary, manipulative, and, of course, firmly centered in her brilliant imagination.

This Emily withdrew from the world not for her own safety, but to protect others. Gordon writes facilely yet engagingly of Dickinson's poetry, proposing, for example, that the most enigmatic poems "work" when a reader meets the poet's "demand for a reciprocal response, a complimentary act of introspection," and that "her dashes push the language apart to open up the space where we live without language."

Her portrait of the poet in later life gives way to the torchy, divisive love affair between Emily's married brother Austin and Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, who soon became the first editor of the poems after Dickinson's death. The remarkable romance, scarcely news to an American audience, is here repackaged to advantage Susan Dickinson, Austin's wronged wife and the poet's close ally. Sue's story, Gordon argues, has been eclipsed by an evil legend from Todd's poison pen.