Lives Like Loaded Guns
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This biography is informed by two revelations: first, a bombshell that is likely to be debated as long as there are inquiring readers of Emily Dickinson; and second, the effect of a family love affair on the poet's long and complex publishing history. When Dickinson writes I felt a Funeral, in my Brain and punctuates her work in a spasmodic style, Gordon maintains we are privy to the neuronal misfiring of epilepsy. Gordon unearths compelling evidence: the glycerine Dickinson was prescribed, then a common treatment for epilepsy; her photosensitivity; and a family history of epilepsy. The stigma-packed condition, says Gordon, is at least one source of Dickinson's celebrated isolation. Gordon, biographer of Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft, also recounts the fallout from the affair between the poet's straitlaced, married brother, Austin, and the far younger, also married Mabel Loomis Todd. In a literary land grab, descendants of the families of Dickinson and Todd (who edited many of Emily's papers) squared off in a fight to control the poet's work and myth. Although deciphering Emily Dickinson's mysterious personality is like trying to catch a ghost, this startling biography explains quite a lot. 16 pages of b&w photos; 2 maps. (June 14)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Despite a host of books about Dickinson and her work, Lives Like Loaded Guns is full of surprises regarding the poet's life and influences. Although Gordon reaches for conclusions to some of the bigger questions--among them Dickinson's possible epilepsy, her love life, and the complicated relationship she had with her brother, Austin, his wife, and his mistress (who aspired to edit the poet's work)--the author's research into Dickinson's medical records and correspondence breathes fresh air into otherwise settled literary history. In the end, no one disputes that Dickinson lived largely in a world of her own making. So much the better, Gordon ably points out, as it was a place where she could practice art "made at the interface of abandon and decorum."
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
86 of 97 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wild Nights; Wild Fights.,
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This review is from: Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds (Hardcover)
Reading the reviews below reminds me that there are no feuds as acrimonious and petty as academic ones. Apparently, a disagreement between Lyndall Gordon and other Dickinson biographers regarding whether Dickinson had epilepsy has inspired those dissenting biographers to trash her book on Amazon.com. Did Gordon have the temerity to disregard their advice? Well, we'll have none of that; in the interests of scholarship (yeah, sure) we'll make sure that the world knows how right we were, and how wrong she was to ignore our criticism.
Now -- the book. Lyndall Gordon has written a fascinating account of the feud between the Dickinsons and Mabel Loomis Todd, the extramarital lover of Dickinson's brother, that delayed the publication of much of Dickinson's work for over 50 years. Extending through two generations, and possibly a contributing factor in the deaths of some of the players, the feud began when Dickinson's brother, Austin, embarked on a mid-life, adulterous romance with Todd, the young wife of an Amherst science professor. As Dickinson's poems and letters lay hidden away in the pages of books, locked trunks, and dust-filled boxes, the protagonists of this extraordinary tale battled for recognition and vindication and -- not incidentally -- to destroy one another's claims to Emily Dickinson's affections Gordon describes, not merely the feud, but also the way in which the competing narratives spun by the adversaries -- including the putative "editors" of Dickinson's work, her betrayed sister-in-law, Susan and her sister, Lavinia, and the actual editor, Mabel Todd -- misrepresented their own characters and motives, and also those of the poet herself, who had an emotional vitality and network of relationship that belied the myth of the frail recluse of Amherst. Public attitudes, Gordon demonstrates, played an active role in such dramas, eagerly embracing the myth of the "frail" and emotionally chaste Dickinson and, during a trial in Amherst in the years after Dickinson's death, thwarting the adulterous Mabel Todd's attempts to have her rights to a portion of Dickinson land validated. Gordon shows that, in life as in literature, there is no "binary right or wrong, guilty or not guilty," (p. 312), and that truth is elusive and must be approached inclusively, taking into account the stories that individuals tell, and often believe, about themselves and one another. Perhaps that is the lesson that those who criticize Gordon's scholarship might learn. True, Dickinson may not have been an epileptic. Taking all the factors that Gordon describes into account, however, some sort of seizure disorder might have been included among her ailments. Certainly, the theory is plausible, and provides readers (including this one) with an additional, intriguing interpretation of Dickinson's poems. Yet the nature of Dickinson's illness is not what this book is about. Instead, the book is about the enduring power of art, emotion, and need: a great poet's work is nearly swallowed up by, but survives, a love that is so powerful that it gives rise to an everlasting hatred -- a hatred so powerful that it creates a perverse kind of art -- narratives -- of its own. As a college instructor and a practicing attorney, I found this work on Dickinson enjoyable on many levels, and give it "five stars." How ironic that a book about a feud should spark antagonisms that, in their own way, prove the author's points.
60 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
More on Epilepsy,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds (Hardcover)
As a Dickinson biographer of fifty years, one oft parahrased in Lyndall Gordon's sensational take on Dickinson's life, I would add to Hirschhorn's authoritative report on epilepsy that Gordon misrepresents another "epileptic" in her book. Identifying the illness in Zebina Montague, second cousin to Dickinson's father, strengthens her argument that the disease ran in the Dickinson family. However, Montague was a paralytic, not an epileptic. Having suffered a crippling stroke in his early thirties, he remained partially paralyzed the rest of his long, far-from-reclusive, life. In nineteenth century Amherst epilepsy wasn't the dread secret Ms Gordon would have us believe. Dickinson family records mention that Emily's nephew Ned suffered from the disease, as did another child in town, yet nowhere is there evidence the poet was afflicted until this new biography, where the condition serves to reinterpret poems and explain why Emily Dickinson never married. Gordon has written a number of fine biographies, but may have overexerted herself in this one.
71 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Epilepsy diagnosis based on misunderstanding of pharmacology,
This review is from: Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds (Hardcover)
Lyndall Gordon's biography of Emily Dickinson is operatic in scope (John Adams, take note). But equally dramatic is her diagnosis of epilepsy, based almost entirely on a misunderstanding of Nineteenth Century pharmacotherapy -- a subject I am well versed in. Gordon found an 1874 formula for epilepsy that contained chloral hydrate, glycerine and peppermint. Since Dickinson took glycerine in 1851-54, Gordon assumed that glycerine was the active ingredient, and used the diagnosis to `explain' Dickinson's reclusion, and to reinterpret many of Dickinson's poems and relationships.
In fact, the active ingredient in the formula was chloral hydrate, an anti-convulsant first used in 1870, which Dickinson, to anyone's knowledge, never took. In no pharmacopoeia, textbook of medicine or specialty text on epilepsy written in the 19th century was glycerine ever mentioned for epilepsy; neither in a book by the physician who treated her. Glycerine was used externally as a lotion; internally to disguise the taste of acrid drugs (like chloral hydrate); and -- in Dickinson's case -- as a supposed nutritive against tuberculosis (consumption), which Dickinson's doctor may have suspected (see my website for the essay, "Was it Tuberculosis?"). Dickinson even recommended the medicine to her brother for his cough. I shared my new research on this matter with Lyndall Gordon, which she acknowledged receiving, when the book first came out in Great Britain; I hoped she would correct the error in time for the US edition. I regret to say she hasn't. There have been too many potted theories about Dickinson that trivialize the poet and her remarkable -- if still mysterious -- persona to allow this one to go by without complaint. Norbert Hirschhorn MD [...]
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