The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel

This is one of those books you either love or hate with equal ardor. I love it, but at first found myself a bit confused. Why was the quintessential wordsmith, the poet of Amherst, tossing around such common words as ain’t? And why was she frequenting unseemly places and falling in love with unseemly men? For a brief moment I thought of jumping ship, but the part about the insane asylum grabbed me by the ankles and anchored me back to the pages. And so I read on and with reading came a glimmer of enlightenment. The novel is not meant to be excruciatingly biographical. Charyn has created a dream sequence based on a scholarly study of Emily’s work, particularly the Master Letters. Emily, he contends, was a woman ahead of her time, a woman so 21st century it’s no wonder nobody “got” her, even her own family. Her father, with whom she lived for years as an adult, waxed poetic over his mediocre son Austin and kept his praise for Emily, a literary genius, confined to her ability to bake bread and black cake. Charyn explores the inner Emily and shatters the sanitized Belle of Amherst myth.