Lives Like Loaded Guns
Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds
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Narrated by:
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Wanda McCaddon
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By:
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Lyndall Gordon
About this listen
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 to be 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, listeners, and scholars.
©2010 Lyndall Gordon (P)2010 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
You may well be wondering what the big deal is about the legacy of innovative American poet Emily Dickinson, and how the controversy over this legacy could possibly stay interesting for 15 hours of audiobook. No matter what your level of knowledge about the poet’s life and work might be, here is a strangely compelling tale that will ideally put a full century of literary demons to rest once and for all. Between Lyndall Gordon and Wanda McCaddon, there is a confluence of writing and narration that is sure to delight biography fans of all kinds.
A career biographer of influential literary personalities, Gordon has won awards for her work on T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Charlotte Brontë. There is no researcher more capable of weaving a cohesive final truth report on the conflicts in Dickinson’s family, and no writer more skilled at keeping the tale interesting without stooping to a licentious tabloid tone. Wanda McCaddon, who has won awards for her voice work on other biographies as well as period classics like Sense and Sensibility, is the perfect choice to render this unusual and drawn-out battle for publication credits with dry British wit and the perilous dignity for which the Dickinson family was famous.
In the beginning of the book, Gordon is occupied with answering questions that have long plagued Dickinson scholars: What was the precise nature of the poet’s relationship with Susan Dickinson, wife of her brother, Austin? Was Dickinson indeed an epileptic? Is there any evidence that the “Master”, to whom the poet often wrote love letters and essays, was a real person? Why did Dickinson wear white for years, and never leave her father’s house? But the more delicious core concern of the book is to settle the question of how Austin Dickinson’s adulterous affair with Mabel Todd impacted Emily while she was living, and then the control of Emily’s work once she was dead.
McCaddon is in fine lively form when sharing the direct quotations from Emily herself, from the vast supply of letters, poems, and legal documents increasingly seeing the light of day. Gordon comes down squarely and consistently on the side of the Dickinson women through the generations from Emily, to sister Lavinia, to sister-in-law Susan, to Susan’s daughter Mattie who each tried to protect the publication rights from encroachment by Austin’s mistress and then Mabel’s daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham. Whether or not you find yourself agreeing with how the hundred years of infamously shady literary antagonism shakes down, one thing is clear: with all the drama this complex love affair provoked, the Dickinsons were wise not to have kept actual loaded guns in the house. Megan Volpert
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intriguing
- By Jean on 06-18-16
By: Michael Shelden
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Lara
- The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago
- By: Anna Pasternak
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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When Stalin came into power in 1924, the Communist government began persecuting dissident writers. Though Stalin spared the life of Boris Pasternak - whose novel in progress, Doctor Zhivago, was suspected of being anti-Soviet - he persecuted Boris' mistress, typist, and literary muse, Olga Ivinskaya. Boris' affair with Olga devastated the straitlaced Pasternaks, and they were keen to disavow Olga's role in Boris' writing process.
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A wonderfully enjoyable read
- By gran 80 on 03-15-17
By: Anna Pasternak
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House of Dreams
- The Life of L.M. Montgomery
- By: Liz Rosenberg, Julie Morstad - illustrator
- Narrated by: Susan Hanfield
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Once upon a time, there was a girl named Maud who adored stories. When she was fourteen years old, Maud wrote in her journal, "I love books. I hope when I grow up to be able to have lots of them." Not only did Maud grow up to own lots of books, she wrote twenty-four of them herself as L. M. Montgomery, the world-renowned author of Anne of Green Gables. For many years, her lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression, her "year of mad passion" and her difficult married life were buried deep within her unpublished personal journals....
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Home’o’dreams
- By Steve G. on 02-25-20
By: Liz Rosenberg, and others
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Louisa
- The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams
- By: Louisa Thomas
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 15 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in circumstances very different from the New England upbringing of future president John Quincy Adams, whose life had been dedicated to public service from the earliest age. And yet John Quincy fell in love with her almost despite himself. Their often tempestuous but deeply close marriage lasted half a century.
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Insightful
- By Jean on 05-18-16
By: Louisa Thomas
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Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
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A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
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Zelda Fitzgerald
- The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess
- By: Sally Cline
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.
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The Beautiful and the Bungled
- By Silverthorne on 12-08-17
By: Sally Cline
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I Am Dynamite!
- A Life of Nietzsche
- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
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Fascinating; tragic
- By Cineaste21 on 12-30-18
By: Sue Prideaux
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Marmee and Louisa
- The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother
- By: Eve LaPlante
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 14 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Biographers have consistently credited her father, Bronson Alcott, for Louisa May Alcott's professional success, assuming that this outspoken idealist was the source of her progressive thinking and remarkable independence. But in this riveting dual biography, Eve LaPlante explodes those myths, drawing on unknown and unexplored letters and journals to show that Louisa's "Marmee", Abigail May Alcott, was in fact the intellectual and emotional center of her daughter's world. It was Abigail who urged Louisa to write, who inspired many of her stories, and who gave her the support and courage she needed to pursue her path.
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Hardworking women and the man they supported
- By Chris on 04-26-13
By: Eve LaPlante
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Effie
- The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais
- By: Suzanne Fagence Cooper
- Narrated by: Sophie Ward
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Effie Gray, a beautiful and intelligent young socialite, rattled the foundations of England's Victorian age. Married at 19 to John Ruskin, the leading art critic of the time, she found herself trapped in a loveless, union after Ruskin rejected her on their wedding night. She met John Everett Millais, Ruskin's protege, and fell passionately in love with him. Suzanne Fagence Cooper has gained exclusive access to Effie's previously unseen letters and diaries to tell the complete story of this scandalous love triangle.
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Fascinating Story--Victoriana
- By Cariola on 06-29-12
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Those Wild Wyndhams
- Three Sisters at the Heart of Power
- By: Claudia Renton
- Narrated by: Claudia Renton
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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They were confidantes to British prime ministers, poets, writers, and artists, their lives entwined with the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day, from Oscar Wilde to Henry James. They were the lovers of great men - or men of great prominence... They lived in a world of luxurious excess, a world of splendor at 44 Belgrave Square and later at the even more vast Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house on 4,000 acres, the "house of the age", designed in 1876 by the visionary architect Philip Webb - the model for Henry James' The Spoils of Poynton.
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SLOW START BUT STICK WITH THIS ONE
- By The Louligan on 01-22-19
By: Claudia Renton
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Figuring
- By: Maria Popova
- Narrated by: Natascha McElhone
- Length: 21 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries - beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement.
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Stunning
- By Laura on 03-12-19
By: Maria Popova
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Things I've Been Silent About
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Naila Azad
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
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Family portrait in the frame of history
- By Galina COS on 07-02-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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Proust's Duchess
- How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siecle Paris
- By: Caroline Weber
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 29 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Adhéaume de Chevigné; and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, the Comtesse Greffulhe--these were the three superstars of fin-de-siècle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber says, "transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style."
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Enthralling, entertaining and brilliant
- By Uli Baer on 01-14-19
By: Caroline Weber
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The Club
- Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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Wonderful survey
- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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Love Letters of Great Men
- By: John C. Kirkland
- Narrated by: Chris Patton
- Length: 2 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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When words of love do not come to you on their own, then listen to these letters. Complete, actual love letters of great men like Lord Byron, John Keats, and Voltaire. Leaders like Henry VIII, George Washington, and Napoléon, who wrote to his beloved Joséphine, "I awake consumed with thoughts of you...." Artists like van Gogh, Mozart, and Beethoven, who famously penned, "Though still in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved...."
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For all us hopeless romantics!
- By Stitch on 04-12-13
By: John C. Kirkland
What listeners say about Lives Like Loaded Guns
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Paul Sas
- 10-01-12
Great first half, but what a slog in the 2nd
The account of the family feud amongst Emily Dickinson's brother & others is fascinating. Who knew that someone in the 1870s could be virtually polyamorous? Austin Dickinson was in a marriage that cooled, due to his fear that his wife Susan would be harmed by any additional pregnancies. Although their marriage was not dead, it was gravely wounded when an astronomer, David Todd, came to Amherst, with his wife Mabel. The marriage between the Todds was decidedly odd. David was a louche, who angled to get other women into bed. He encouraged his wife to pursue a symmetrically open attitude. When she encountered the charismatic Austin, she swooned, and they eventually consummated their "marriage" of true minds. She did continue relations with her weasel husband, David, and he actively encouraged this affair, since it greatly aided his standing within Amherst College, where Austin was the treasurer. There's a sad, and somewhat sordid, quality to this affair, since 3 of the parties were enthusiasts, but the 4th, Susan Dickinson, was greatly aggrieved. While Lyndall's book fascinates in its first half, focused on Emily Dickinson, and her family milieu, the second half is a serious slog. Very few people can be expected to care about the posthumous manipulation of Emily Dickinson's oeuvre with anything like the intensity of attention lavished upon it by the author. It's certainly fascinating the Mrs. Mabel Todd succeeded in controlling a great deal of the manuscripts left by Emily, notwithstanding the apparent fact that Emily never once deigned to speak to her, and could plausibly be viewed as being quite chilly toward this usurper. If the second half had been compressed by a factor of ten, it might have been a great story. But the endless dilations on the manuscript wars can only be of interest to a very small number of scholars. I write this as someone who has a great appetite for academic feuds. The former magazine Lingua Franca could have made hey of this in an incisive 10 to 15,000 word essay, which could have been delicious. But to spend more than 5 times that many words on something so dusty is ultimately a misperception of the audience that could possibly exist for such a work.
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3 people found this helpful
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- elbgwn
- 02-11-22
Reader a puzzling pick
Fascinating biography. I like the reader but why a British reader was chosen for a bio of an American is odd. She mispronounces various American towns, using a British pronunciation, including the poet’s home town, Amherst, in which the “h” should be silent. Seeing as Emily lived her life in Amherst, we hear it mispronounced hundreds of times. Whatever. So interesting!
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- J. A.
- 10-10-15
Best when not using poems as biographical evidence
although the author warns against using poems as biography she can't seem to help herself, immediately launching into some of the poems as actual evidence. It's hard to blame her though. But where this book really is outstanding is with her use of the letters and other legal documents and journals from all the many different players involved. I feel like I have learned so much more about Dickinson and her family. And though I'm happy to have done so, I can't help but feel that the poems have now become that much more inaccessible.
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- Jacqueline english
- 08-27-22
The whole book is quite interesting
Some readers have said the second half of the story is less compelling. The first part that traces Emily Dickinson and her circle is fascinating for sure. I feel I have a better understanding and appreciation of her life and her work. The second half is about her literary legacy and who is to oversee and control her image. A very important part of the story and equally compelling as we see the rivals play out a drama that began with betrayal and infidelity.
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- gail pierson
- 07-28-17
The Hatfields and McCoys! :)
Where does Lives Like Loaded Guns rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
I've been on an Emily Dickinson obsession as of late, moreso of Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson and their love affair. Though this book just touched on the affair, it did have quite a bit of information after Emily's death about the feud that ensued because of her poems.
What did you like best about this story?
That back in the 1900's naughty stuff took place! :) And, that a woman stood her ground and did not conform to society's expectation. That's my kind of gal.
Which character – as performed by Wanda McCaddon – was your favorite?
She read the whole book, not really changing voices for characters.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
15+ hours....def could not! :)
Any additional comments?
Loved it! :)
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1 person found this helpful
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- Friend
- 07-20-17
Why is the book being read by a Britisher?
What made the experience of listening to Lives Like Loaded Guns the most enjoyable?
It is a fascinating biography, which I have not yet finished. However, the reader has a heavy British accent that I at moments find hard to penetrate. Am baffled by why she was chosen.
Would you be willing to try another one of Wanda McCaddon’s performances?
No.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No.
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- Cariola
- 12-04-10
Take the Subtitle Literally
If you're looking for a book about Emily Dickinson's life, this may not be it: she dies about halfway through, and the rest of the book focuses on the bickering over who should edit her works and letters, who owns the copyrights, who should get the royalties, who knew her best and is therefore entitled to do lecture tours about her, where the archives should be housed, etc. Some of this is very interesting, some not so much.
Most of the quarrels and lawsuits involve Mabel Loomis Todd, who edited the first selection of Emily's work. This is not surprising, since Mabel was also the mistress of Emily's married brother, Austin Dickinson, and had never met or even seen Emily, although they did correspond. After Austin's death, Mabel and his widow, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, engaged in a series of legal and social battles. Susan had been a true friend to Emily, who had written many of her poems specifically for Sue's perusal and comments, and she contested Todd's right to edit (and profit from) the collected poems and letters. After Sue's death, Emily's sister Lavinia, who initially sided with Mabel, picked up the fight.
The feuds continued until the 1940s, eventually involving Emily's niece and great nephew and Mabel's legitimate daughter, Millicent Todd (who had a breakdown of sorts when she found letters that revealed the true nature of her mother's "friendship" with Austin Dickinson).
If you know nothing about Emily Dickinson's life (i.e., you haven't read one of the more authoritative biographies), you might find the first half of the book interesting--although much of it sets up the 'characters' in the family's feuds over her work. If you've read a good biography and are a Dickinson afficiando or scholar, you may find some intriguing information about the history of the promotion and publication of her work and letters and the creation of the image of the ethereal recluse in a white dress. I fall somehere in between.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Andreea Marin
- 12-08-15
Can't go wrong with Dickinson
I loved this book. Worth a read and a listen. A great biographical depiction of the poet.
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3 people found this helpful
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- greyhound
- 01-26-17
Great ending
Well researched, vindicating and thought provoking. Enjoyed very much. Would have liked more poems, but there can never be enough
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3 people found this helpful
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- Lisa Perry
- 10-17-17
Well worth the read
The interplay between Emily and her family, Mabel Todd and the Dickinson family, and how the poems came to be published is a fascinating read. Very well researched. Loved the narrator, could listen to her all day.
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1 person found this helpful