The Life of Emily Dickinson

Richard Sewall spent more than twenty years on The Life of Emily Dickinson, and the book's method is its genius: knowing that the poet left almost no direct record of herself, he circles inward, devoting the first of two volumes to the people around her, the formidable Dickinson family of Amherst, the ambitious grandfather, the severe father Edward, the strange still mother, brother Austin and sister Lavinia, and the explosive affair between Austin and Mabel Loomis Todd that split the family and shaped how the poems reached print. Only then, with the world established, does the second volume approach Emily herself, through her schooling, her reading, her handful of intense friendships and correspondences, the preceptor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the mysterious master letters, and the gradual withdrawal into the white dressed seclusion that legend made of her. Sewall, who taught English at Yale for four decades, writes against the legend at every step. His Dickinson is not the fragile nun of Amherst but a deliberate artist of ferocious intelligence who chose her conditions and used them, and the biography constantly sends the reader back to the poems as work rather than symptoms. It won the 1975 National Book Award in Biography and stood for decades as the definitive life, the account later biographers correct at the margins; critics such as Lyndall Gordon have since argued that Sewall's reliance on the Todd family papers tilted his telling of the family war, which is the kind of argument only a monument attracts. For readers who want the whole Dickinson world, this is still the book.