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Sat 02 Feb 2010The passion behind the poetry
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s FeudsBy Lyndall Gordon Virago, 491pp. £20
CLANDESTINE TRYSTS on the black, horsehair sofa of the dining room downstairs; love letters smuggled through a go-between; an established husband who threw himself into an affair with the kind of woman who liked to hand-paint sweet-peas on her cuffs; a rejected wife who, one furious night, scrapes the wallpaper entirely off the homestead hall: not quite, any of it, the background circumstances we expect of Emily Dickinson’s family life.
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