Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds »

Lyndall Gordon is the author of Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, a New York Times Notable Book; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life, winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography; as well as biographies of T.S. Eliot and Charlotte Bronte. She is a senior research fellow at St. Hilda's College in Oxford, England.

A startling portrayal of one of America's most significant literary figures that will change the way we view her life and legacy

In 1882, Emily Dickinson's brother Austin began a passionate love affair with Mabel Todd, a young Amherst faculty wife, setting in motion a series of events that would forever change the lives of the Dickinson family. The feud that erupted as a result has continued for over a century. Lyndall Gordon, an award-winning biographer, tells the riveting story of the Dickinsons, and reveals Emily as a very different woman from the pale, lovelorn recluse that exists in the popular imagination. Thanks to unprecedented use of letters, diaries, and legal documents, Gordon digs deep into the life and work of Emily Dickinson, to reveal the secret behind the poet's insistent seclusion, and presents a woman beyond her time who found love, spiritual sustenance, and immortality all on her own terms. An enthralling story of creative genius, filled with illicit passion and betrayal, Lives Like Loaded Guns is sure to cause a stir among Dickinson's many devoted readers and scholars.

The Barnes & Noble Review

There is more than enough drama to go around in Gordon's book -- jealousies, deceit, the agonized shredding of wallpaper, even evidence of a ménage à trois -- and she often renders it in the plush detail of a pot-boiler. But beneath the operatic swell is an admirable amount of new information about Dickinson's world and the choices she made in the service of what she recognized as her magnificent gift. She was far more fierce than we've been led to believe, which makes perfect sense given the work she left behind. Writing to Ned at a particularly difficult moment, she closed her letter with a command no less forceful for its affection: "And ever be sure of me, Lad" -- a characteristically straight shot that echoes in every one of her poems.

I: A Poet Next Door 1

II: 'A StillVolcanoLife'

1 The First Family 21

2 A Scientific Education 39

3 Sister 61

4 'Wife Without the Sign' 93

5 'Snarl in the Brain' 114

6 Telling 137

7 Romancing Judge Lord 156

8 Split in the Family 169

III: Mabel's Reign

9 Emily's Stand 197

10 Lady Macbeth of Amherst 231

11 Mabel in Excelsis 250

IV: The War Between The Houses

12 Lavinia's Stand 279

13 The Trial 299

14 Defeats of the First Generation 313

15 Two Daughters 326

16 The Battle of the Daughters 345

17 Posthumous Campaigns 369

V: Outliving The Legend 399

Sources 407

Notes 425

Acknowledgements 471

Index 475

Index of First Lines 490