The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

An astonishing novel that removes Emily Dickinson’s own mysterious mask and reveals the passions and heartbreak of America’s greatest poet.

What if the old maid of Amherst wasn’t an old maid at all? Her older brother, Austin, spoke of Emily as his “wild sister.” Jerome Charyn, continuing his exploration of American history through fiction, has written a startling novel about Emily Dickinson in her own voice, with all its characteristic modulations that he learned from her letters and poems. The poet dons a hundred veils, alternately playing wounded lover, penitent, and female devil. We meet the significant characters of her life, including her tempestuous sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert; her brooding father, Edward; and the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who may have inspired some of her greatest letters and poems.

Charyn has also invented characters, including an impoverished fellow student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, who will betray her; and a handyman named Tom, who will obsess Emily throughout her life. Charyn has written an extraordinary adventure that will disturb and delight. 9 illustrations.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Poetry, Historical, Novels, Literary Fiction, Contemporary

352 pages, Hardcover

First published February 22, 2010

About the author

Jerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With more than 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac," and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."

Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year.

Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.

In addition to writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top ten percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong."

Charyn's most recent novel, Jerzy, was described by The New Yorker as a "fictional fantasia" about the life of Jerzy Kosinski, the controversial author of The Painted Bird. In 2010, Charyn wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an imagined autobiography of the renowned poet, a book characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as a "fever-dream picaresque."

Charyn lives in New York City. He's currently working with artists Asaf and Tomer Hanuka on an animated television series based on his Isaac Sidel crime novels.

Reviews

[Amy Moritz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have been a huge fan of Emily Dickinson since high school. In fact, I rejoiced when the poem given for interpretation on the advanced placement exam was one of hers. Easy money on that test. So I was intrigued to read this fictionalized account of Emily's life . Charyn spent much time studying Dickinson's poems and writings and did a wonderful job recreating her pattern of speech to create a glimpse into her wild mind. She was fearless and playoff and prone to grief and anxiety. Her relationship with her family members, particularly the repressive relationship with her father, is teased out and terribly interesting.

But there are things I really don't like about this book. Charyn introduces fictional characters Tom the handyman and Zilpah Marsh, both of whom play a role throughout the novel. They constantly show up in more and more improbably situations. Tom and Zilpah make Emily seem wholly unbalanced and naive. She may have been nutty, but she was wise and witty and this story line merely brings out a delusional Emily.

I would have liked Charyn to bring out more of the writer Emily than the childish lovelorn Emily. None of her poems are included and her work as a poetess seems to always be couched in self-doubt. While she wasn't public with her writing, she did share it often in correspondence. This is the woman who coined one of my all-time favorite phrases, one in which I live by: "Dwell in Possibility." That part of Emily's personality is missing from this reading of her life. And that left me wanting a heck of a lot more.

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a totally fractured presupposition that the great Emily Dickinson had a completely buried past that threatened to undo her self possession!

NOT.

As a bipolar-disjointed near-octogenarian I know whereof I speak.

Not of my ilk? Most decidedly not.

It takes one to know one! And I just KNOW.

I feel it in my bones. Witness the review I wrote of The Witches (look for it in my own words here)!

***


Even the Puritans were on fire spiritually.

́Look for the compilation Protestant Mysticism. May be hard to get, though. Believe me: a mystic is not unbalanced!

Just strange to our sceptical eyes.

And our world now is chock-a-block full of sceptics!

So where do we go?

Nowhere. We're Snookered by Big Brother.

***

I don't mind.

The Machine is now 'Right' to be Wrong!

[Mark Traphagen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Historical fiction is a daring enterprise, which is a polite way of saying that it borders on the foolhardy at one extreme and the arrogant at the other. If attempting to recreate a time and place neither author nor reader can visit to verify smacks of foolhardy hubris, then fictionalized autobiography might be something worse. However, after reading The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, the reader is glad author Jerome Charyn risked something worse to achieve something better: an engaging, intriguing, dreamscape creation of an Emily Dickinson who, if not the one who actually existed, leads a “secret life” we would wish for the reclusive bard of Amherst.

Emily Dickinson does not seem like the most fertile ground for novelization. Aside from the words of poetry she left us, she is best known for hiding out in her bedroom for decades, communicating with others only by notes or from behind a partially-opened door. Charyn seemed to want to pursue the question “how could someone who barely ever left her room write so convincingly and sensuously about the world?” Charyn’s answer is to hypothesize that shy Emily may have been more the adventuress than we have known.

Charyn’s Emily certainly gets out more than her historical counterpart did. Though for the most part Emily of Secret Life stays true to the famous reclusive image, she can’t resist getting herself up close and personal with flesh-and-blood representatives of some of the more salacious eroticisms hinted at throughout her poetry.

To facilitate those adventures, Charyn freely mixes his own created characters in among the real historical persons who surrounded Miss Dickinson. Some of these act as the chief dramatic foils to the poetess’s otherwise carefully controlled and constructed life. Most intriguing is Zilpah Marsh, one of Emily’s classmates at the Holyoke Seminary. Zilpah is every bit as intelligent and witty as Emily, but her lower class origins drag her down a different, more ignominious path. Even still, Emily finds herself often envious of her less fortunate rival. We are introduced to Zilpah as she and Emily battle over Tom, the school handyman, who oozes both raw sexuality and pure romance. Though Emily seems to appreciate Tom more, it is Zilpah who ends up living with him.

Tom is another fictitious character, who Charyn brings into Emily’s life to be that ideal of the pure man whom she will always pursue but never own. Tom is “that blond Assassin in the sunlight” (from Dickinson’s poem “Apparently with no surprise…”). Like an assassin, he appears unexpectedly and in many disguises throughout Emily’s life, and the bullets he shoots at her are the ways his presence reminds her of what she sacrificed for her art.

But the character who looms largest in the life of Jerome Charyn’s Emily is her very real father. Emily may have an active “secret life,” but the central motivator for all she does is a need to please and be admired by her father. Squire Dickinson of the novel is at the same time Emily’s biggest cheerleader and harshest judge, though he almost never speaks either a word of praise or of judgment. His ability to be both intimately close and coldly distant is a painful enigma for Emily. He is a driven man, well-aware of his position as the most prominent citizen of Amherst. She describes him as “a ferocious engine on a lonely track.” Yet Emily is able to see a warm and tender heart that she wishes he could turn more toward her. When her father laments that Emily’s return from Holyoke Seminary means no more of her letters at the post office, she teases that she could plant letters there for him. He tells her it wouldn’t be the same, “because I couldn’t hear the hunger in your lines.” Her father’s aloofness is his way of encouraging the hunger he knows essential to her art, and it is both Emily’s greatest pain and her most useful inspiration.

A painful and shocking sampling of this tough love occurs fairly early in the novel. Visiting her rival doppelgänger Zilpah in an insane asylum, Emily observes her father showing the half-mad woman a tenderness and compassion she herself had never known from him. Though she takes this as the universe’s recompense on her for her earlier mistreatment of Zilpah, she also realizes that this will be the way of her life. Denial of intimacy with those from whom she most desires it drives her to the world she can create on slips of paper with the pencil stub always tied by a string to her dress.

Yet Emily’s relationship with her father is not all ice and distance. When she discovers that her father actually had read some of her poetry she had left out for him to find, she asks why he never told her. “Dolly [his pet name for her:],” he said, “it’s taken me two years to recover. They nearly tore my head off.” For Emily, such an impact on her father is nearly as good as a tender embrace, though she would have welcomed the latter. She seeks a replacement for that embrace in a succession of men she courts from afar, but that kind of fulfillment is not to be hers.

While these interpersonal conflicts drive the plot of the novel and sketch out Charyn’s thesis for possibilities of why Emily turned out the way she did, it is the language of the novel, its use of words and turns of phrase, that raise The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson to a work of brilliance. The author succeeds in creating a voice for Emily that rings true. We can never know, of course, if this is really how she felt and thought, but if somehow it turned out to be close to the truth, we would not be surprised. Once when a friend asks Emily what the actual subject of one of her poems was, Charyn has her respond, “Verses do not have a subject, I should think, but a kind of shudder, as if the whole world were born again within the flash of an eye.” Another time she remarks, “I have no terrain. I dance on a precipice, knowing I will fall.” These are lines we could easily believe the Belle of Amherst actually uttered.

Historical fiction and biography at their best offer us an alternate world of the past. While almost certainly not “historical” in the strictest sense, nonetheless they provide us not only with insight into the past figures who serve as characters, but also a window into the human condition which transcends all time and place. While many of Emily’s struggles as depicted by Jerome Charyn are specific to her historical situatedness (e.g., the resistance to women as “serious” authors), yet we recognize the universal joys and sufferings of any creative person in any time. That The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson succeeds in doing this with one of the more obscure personages of modern literary history is a credit to the skill of the author.

Note: This review originally appeared in The Englewood Review of Books [Vol. 3, #19:].

[Markus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Emily Dickinson’s Secret Life
By Jerome Charyn

The much-acclaimed author Jerome Charyn has used the well know name of the great American Poetess Emily Dickinson, hoping to produce a bestselling novel.
While the author’s writing style and skill are beyond negative critics, in ‘The Secret Life’ he is using a scant few lines from Emily’s poetry and her view on the world of men to produce a work of eight nightmares.
Charyn is describing Emily Dickinson as a sex maniac obsessed with men and how to find a suitor of any social status, appearance or wealth who will marry her.
The work is an insult to Emily Dickinson’s name.

[Ron Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

If all you know about dear Emily Dickinson comes from a few sparkling nature poems and "The Belle of Amherst," cover your eyes. Your carriage is about to cross into Amherst's red-light district. Jerome Charyn's new novel about the poet tears up William Luce's classic play as though it were a faded greeting card. With its X-ray vision of what's really goin' on under her long white skirt, "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson" promises a tarted-up tale of America's favorite poet -- and that narrow fellow in the grass.

The bawdy dust jacket and suggestive title aren't entirely misleading. For more than 40 years, Charyn has been mating fact and fiction in clever ways. In 2008, he attracted some good attention for "Johnny One-Eye," a comic picaresque about the American Revolution. But fooling around with George Washington and Benedict Arnold is one thing; taking the Sacred Virgin of American Poetry to second base is another. We want the prim Dickinson who told a friend, "The lovely flowers embarrass me," but here we see her sitting on a frat boy's lap squealing about the eruption of Vesuvius. Charyn has taken the poet at her word that a "secret, perched in ecstacy/Defies imprisonment!"

A desecration? Hardly. Charyn tells the truth, but tells it slant. Dickinson has been teasing us for more than 150 years. During her lifetime as the daughter of Amherst's most prominent man, she was famously reclusive -- and alluring. She lowered notes and treats from her window on a string. She carried on conversations with guests through a door kept barely ajar. She was a master at controlling others by withholding herself: As one of her poems taunts, "Big my Secret but it's bandaged --/It will never get away." And that obsessive privacy continued long after her death in 1886, when her sister discovered more than 1,700 poems in her room. Those perplexing little masterpieces seeped out with excruciating slowness in unhelpfully "corrected" versions. A complete, authoritative edition didn't appear until 1955, 90 years after many of the poems were written during the Civil War.

Several superb biographies of Dickinson have appeared (my favorite is still Cynthia Griffin Wolff's revelatory "Emily Dickinson" from 1986), along with a host of reminiscences and specialized studies, including Brenda Wineapple's marvelous "White Heat" (2008) and the indispensable three-volume variorum edition of the poems, edited by R.W. Franklin in 1998.

Charyn, however, presents something very different. Through a perceptive reading of Dickinson's verse and correspondence, he's re-created her wild mind in all its erudition, playfulness and nervous energy. Purporting to write in her private voice, he catches the erratic feints and poses as she breaks in and out of the third person -- Vampyre, Kangaroo, Queen -- and jumps erratically through little asides and jokes, plunging into fits of grief and anxiety. It's all enough to make you realize, finally, what her friend and first editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, meant when he complained that her "wantonness of overstatement" exhausted him. "I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much."

The arc of the novel follows the basic outline of Dickinson's biography, but Charyn cuts and shapes the story aggressively. And he molds his version of the poet's life around her obsession with two fictional characters from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which the real Dickinson attended briefly around 1847. The first is Tom, the campus handyman with a racy tattoo on his arm. When the novel opens, 17-year-old Emily is enthralled by this rough-hewn character, the sole male at Mount Holyoke. "I had only one wish," she claims: "to be stapled forever to Tom." The headmistress is determined to make these girls into little brides of Christ, but Emily admits with her usual tone of self-mocking melodrama, "I'm hellbound in all my wickedness. . . . Tom had become my Calvary."

Competing with her for his affections is another fictional character: a poor, homely student named Zilpah Marsh, who at different times is Emily's best friend, her maid, her doppelgänger and her curse. Indeed, for decades Tom and Zilpah turn up in various guises and disguises, exciting Emily's romantic affections and dread.

I'm not convinced very much is gained by adding these two characters to Dickinson's life. Tom and Zilpah appear in the strangest and most surreal scenes -- working as a clown or a pickpocket or raving mad in a lunatic asylum -- and Emily's long preoccupation with them tends to make her seem unbalanced, even delusional.

Besides, the family members and acquaintances whom history has provided are quite colorful enough, and they all make a good showing in these pages. Dickinson was a close friend of a prominent newspaper editor named Sam Bowles. She almost married a judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Court when he was in his late 60s. Her volcanic sister-in-law and neighbor, Susan Gilbert, entertained Emerson and other national figures.

Charyn is particularly good at dramatizing the repressive affection of Emily's father, the stern Squire of Amherst, who ruled over the town and his family as a benevolent dictator. That he adores her Emily never doubts, but she also knows he'll never let her go, and she gradually internalizes his cloistered design for her life even as she rails against it. "I am not your favorite feather," she wants to shout at him, "but a woman with a ferocious will."

As the novel moves along, her various romantic obsessions peak and pass, one by one, in fits of hysterical devotion and outrageous behavior ("I have never had such gymnastics performed upon my face. . . . I have no more morals than a harem girl"). Much of the time she seems to be reenacting her own mash-up of "Jane Eyre" and "The Rape of the Lock." Even after she leaves the rakish college boys behind and settles into her old-maid status as "the Squire's eccentric daughter, a meteor in the dark glasses, hopping along like a wingless bird," she still entertains a series of romantic possibilities.

Charyn has a perfect ear for Dickinson's ironic wit, her wicked characterizations of friends and enemies, but even allowing for a novelist's license, much is omitted here that I can't forgive. The flighty, unbalanced and childish Emily is given far more voice in these pages than the profound writer who claimed, "I dwell in Possibility."

The more familiar you are with the poems, the more you'll hear allusions and phrases woven into this narrative ("Because I could not stop for Death" is just one used to gorgeous effect). But we get no full poems in these pages, and that seems a damnable omission. Charyn's Emily mentions that "lines came like lightning and left like lightning, and I had to write each one down with my pencil stub or lose it forever," but these flashes of composition are just the smallest, most incidental part of the novel. From my reading of her poems, Dickinson's life was a fierce battle with her disappointments and with God, a war carried on with those pointed lines, calling Him to account for His clumsiness, His aloofness, His mindless cruelty. But too little of that spiritual acuity and agony rises from Charyn's story. For all the private romantic anxieties spilled here, Dickinson knew that "Dust is the only secret." Without that daring stare into the face of death, the poet's life is a lot of nervous prattle.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/20...

[Connie · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a brilliant idea - a novel from the point of view of the mysterious Emily Dickinson. Such a fascinating historical figure must make a complex and intriguing protagonist, yes? No.

Unfortunately, while Charyn begins with a wonderful idea and makes a (sadly uneven) attempt to imitate Dickinson's diction and syntax, he reduces the Belle of Amherst to a silly, flighty character who suffers from one girlish crush after another - and well past the phase of girlhood.

Another sad omission is that, although the prose is periodically styled after Dickinson's poetry, her poetry itself is glaringly absent.

Unfortunately, this book simply doesn't live up to its promise.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a woman who wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems, Dickinson spends remarkably little time actually writing or thinking about writing in this novel. Instead, she seems consumed with sexual desire for a whole cast of characters. This didn't bother me too much, as I read this as Charyn's attempt to expose and animate the inner workings of a woman's mind during the Victorian period of "piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness." Yet, of the relationships that Emily Dickinson must surely have had, I would have liked to see her relationship with nature more fully developed. Although Charyn mentions Dickinson's penchant for gardening, he does little with it beyond these occasional references. This seems integral to the poetic life of Dickinson, even if it was not part of her "secret life."

Of the relationships that are successfully developed, the most moving of the novel are certainly those she has with her family, specifically her father and her dog Carlo. Even the "queen recluse," needs a companion. She says of her dog that "with him [she:] felt no loneliness." In Charyn's portrayal, the relationship with her father takes on a profound importance in informing how she feels about her writing.

Overall, Charyn has an engaging style and at times the novel delights with smart alliterative phrases and allusions to Dickinson's poetry. It is a fanciful reimagining of one of the most important figures in the American literary landscape and the human relationships that Charyn assumes played a pivotal role in shaping Dickinson's poetic imagination.

[Shane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to put this book down after plowing through 50 pages.

While the life of a writer or poet is often of great interest to fellow scribes, some writers' lives are best left unexplored for those lives were relatively uneventful and are better presented in the fiction or poetry those writers produced. I recall reading similar books on the lives of Henry James, Flannery O'Connor and Marcel Proust (after he retreated into his cork-lined room) and they were flat-lined episodes that diminished these "greats" in my eyes rather than elevate them. These writers lived better in their imaginations than in the real world.

And so it is too with Emily Dickinson, the darling of American poetry who lived in a period when women's lives were narrowly circumscribed. Dickinson narrowed that circle even further by living a reclusive life during her time, dominated by her powerful father, and leaving a treasure trove of poetry to be published posthumously.

Charyn makes a valiant attempt to portray the period, and imbue Dickinson with rebellious, sexual and impulsive thoughts and actions, and breath life into her narrowed life, but it does not go far enough to engage. Perhaps another reader who has a more visceral connections with Dickinson and her poetry may have the patience and the curiosity to plow further than I did.

[Lenore Webb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you remember hearing that silent voice deep inside of you. The one that talks so often to no one else? I know that I am not the only one that has the chat going on. A complete life led in my very own head. Some days are busy and you only hear it at times. Other days the silence is so loud that if sounds as if it is roaring around and your shouting at the top of your lungs. But the words never make it past your own ears.

I feel that is how life had to be for Emily Dickinson. A voice that went on and on, playing out her life before her. Not being realized or noticed by anyone around. Days filled with longing of unfulfilled conversations. And I wonder how many other lives are led just that way even now? The difference? Emily was able to write hers out. In sweeping strokes, her pen traveled across the pages leaving poems behind. Poems that make our heart yearn a lil more. Where we recognize the hurt wing of a bird being the same flapping in our own hearts of love not realized.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn has been my companion this last week. I do have to say that even with my internet down I have been sitting in front of my computer. I had this book downloaded in PDF form and it has been filling my head with words every day. My heart has ached from the beginning where she realizes that a life led in quiet solitude still does not calm the soul. Instead it is filled with dreams of a blue heart pierced by a red arrow marking the arm of a not so perfect desire. Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. In The Secret LIfe of Emily Dickinson he has made her life seem so akin to the voice we hear within. With nearly 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. I have to say, he says it best with his own voice.

Many have read Emily Dickinson's works. Many have commented on what she meant. But it seems that here from Jerome Charyn, Emily has a life that breaths. This is one I would employ you to read. I know that it has had my soul dancing and I love that dance inside.

[Buffy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really, truly did not like this book. Granted, I am not an Emily Dickinson scholar so I could be totally off base here, but Charyn, in an effort to portray the "real Emily" in the face of almost a century of her two dimensional portrayal as a prudish recluse, just seemed to take it to the opposite extreme. It seemed to me that Charyn blatantly ignored most of the known facts of Dickinson's life to the same extent as Dickinson's mistress-in-law (for want of a better title for her brother's mistress) did when she started the original one sided Emily hype.

Charyn took Emily's life from one misguided (and as far as I know, completely made up), bad boy infatuation to the next, giving only this sexuality and some other negative emotions such as jealousy total and complete sway over her life.

One only has to read Emily Dickinson's poetry to realize that she indeed had a healthy and prominent sexuality, however, that was not all she was. I would applaud any effort to portray Dickinson in a well-rounded, three dimension light, however, this book was not it. Emily's poetry and correspondences not only hint at her sexuality, but also her intelligence and her longing for a world where she would not be consigned to the background by her gender which Charyn completely ignored.

I was incredibly excited to read this book but was phenomenally disappointed by Charyn's attempt.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The intriguing title and image (or, should I say the provocative title and image) caught my eye before I had read my first Jerome Charyn novel. I knew I had to read it as I developed my Emily Dickinson quilt.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is the culmination of Chrayn's life-long love of the poet. "I never quite recovered from reading her," he writes in the "Author's Note".

His portrayal of the poet will shatter your received image of Emily Dickinson. Narrated by Emily herself, the novel imagines the men and women who rocked her world and inspired her explosive output of secret love poetry.

Emily's voice is singular and alive, studded with images from her poems. The poems themselves do not appear, but are clandescently scribbled off-screen, although some were secreted into the public's hands against her wishes. We don't need them much; Emily's voice speaks her poetry.

Solving the mystery of Emily's love life has long baffled her readers. Was she lesbian, her sister-in-law Sue or their friend Kate Scott Turner Anthon her great love? Or was she enthralled by 'her Philadelphia', the Rev. Charles Wadsworth of Arch Street Presbyterian Church? She heard him preach while passing through Philly and corresponded with him. Or was it her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson who was a rare chosen recipient of her poetry? Or local newspaperman Sam Bowles?

Or someone lost to history? Like a handsome handyman at Mount Holyoke seminary?

She falls for the lowly orphaned handyman (later turned thief and circus clown). She would have eloped with the Amherst College tutor. She wants to hold the Rev. Wadsworth's hands, scarred from the manual labor that paid his way through school. Society--and the Dickinson patriarch--deem these men unfit for Emily's hand.

In the novel, Emily stalks the objects of her desire. She arranges secret meetings and roams the streets. She is wracked with unfulfilled desire, willing to cross Victorian lines of propriety.

The novel is an amazing marriage of fact and poetry and imagination that might just blow the top of your head off.

I purchased a paperback copy.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book's cover shows a woman in silhouette, her pencil poised over a book. Her skirt is translucent, tantalizingly revealing the outline of her legs and knickers. The title is The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson.

Is it any surprise I expected something a little more shocking, even scandalous?

Instead, author Jerome Charyn gives us an Emily Dickinson that is pretty much what you'd expect: a timid old maid. Her "secret life" exists mainly in her mind, where she lusts after many men (and perhaps a couple of women?) and has weird dreams and visions. Poor Jane doesn't really do anything.

It's possible, even probable, that I am completely missing the point. Perhaps Charyn's premise is that a genius poet like Dickinson would tend to live her life internally. I can buy that, but if I were going to dream up a "secret life," it would be a lot more exciting; more Walter Mitty, if you will. The characters around her are quite interesting, what with going mad or joining the circus or the like, but Emily? Meh.

In the end, I wished that Dickinson's secret life were a little more substantial and a lot more imaginative, two things I never imagined myself saying with respect to Emily Dickinson.

[Bookmarks Magazine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Charyn carefully adheres to the known facts of Dickinson's life, and he has a thorough knowledge of her poems and letters, the strains of which echo through his clever and elegant prose. Despite these qualities, the critics' reactions were tepid and unenthusiastic. They collectively took issue with his characterization of Emily as fickle, unstable, and promiscuous--hardly the makings of a perceptive and profound writer. The Washington Post denounced Charyn's choice to exclude Dickinson's poems from the narrative as a ""damnable omission,"" and the San Francisco Chronicle derisively labeled the novel a ""bodice-ripper."" Readers who cherish Dickinson and her astonishing legacy may find the heroine of Secret Life supremely unsettling; those unacquainted with her should perhaps start with a biography like Brenda Wineapple's White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higgins (**** Nov/Dec 2008). This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Katherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

It started out so promisingly, enticing me by hinting that it would reveal the venerable Miss Dickinson's inner heart... And it did, I suppose, to a point. The prose degenerated as Emily's life went on, but I'm going to assume this is the author's way of portraying the inevitable eccentricities that accompany a lifetime of inner genius without outlet other than writing missives to her sister-in-law and pining for the handyman from her young womanhood at Holyoke. I hate that it was written by a man. I know that's sexist to even think, let alone admit. But considering that Emily Dickinson's contemporaries (the Brontes especially) wrote under male pen names, I kind of wished he's written under a female pen name. I might have been more forgiving had I thought the author was a woman. As it is, I don't think he really captured Emily's essence, and at times, he made her seem ridiculous and perverse.

[Lenore Riegel · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a cliché to describe an author as “channeling” his subject, but in writing The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, author Jerome Charyn does more. He allows me to channel Emily Dickinson - her thoughts and feelings. Now I know the longings and desires she felt as she wrote the words I love. I’m reading her poetry again; this time she’s there with me, a friend, encouraging and helping me understand. If you love Emily Dickinson, I encourage you to read this passionate woman’s novel.

[Stacey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was very readable but I was just unhappy that the book almost never mentioned her poems except vaguely but then made her inner self seem 100% focused on men and getting a husband. I’m sure there was some of that but there was more to her than that.

[L.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Article first published as Book Review:The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn on Blogcritics.

Shrouded in mystery, Emily Dickinson and her life have continued to be of interest to those enthralled with her writing. One of the great poets of our time, her life and times are of great interest. A private person, her life continues to hold a fascination. Who was she, the woman behind the writing?

In The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, Jerome Charyn has written a novel that gives us a glimpse into the possibilities of her life. Using information as well as conjecture, we learn of a woman and her life, its tragedies and triumphs. She is born in a time that woman writers are just beginning to make a mark. Her work becomes known through a series of circumstance.

In a fascinating story told in bold and audacious fashion, Mr. Charyn has delved deep into the psyche of the woman behind the poet. He describes her escapades of the times as well as the problems she is known to have faced. Her relationship with her family and her own wild stunts are brought out in basic relief, a life described in a fashion to make her more human. We sometimes forget the actual humanity of those that rise above, whether is it their celebrity status or their wealth, and Charyn gives us that person behind the mask.

This is often a humorous and yet heartbreaking look at a woman who cut herself off from humanity as she aged. It is a look at her passions’ and her genius, often recognized more by those around her, more so then herself. Overcoming the disapproval of others including her beloved father to make a mark in writing, she is beleaguered by the objection of some of her peers. Her background and life come to stark reality. This is a realistic look at the woman behind the prose.

I would recommend this book as an in depth look at an extremely admirable woman. It is wonderfully written, full of characters that leap off the pages. Jerome Charyn has written about a woman who just happens to be famous, and yet this novel is intriguing without that distraction. Her poetry is secondary to the theme of this book. This is a look as the fragilities’ and vulnerabilities of any one person with the staunchness to overcome and stay true to their nature. This would be a wonderful addition for a book club or discussion group.

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first part of Jerome Charyn’s title alludes to one of Emily Dickinson’s most enigmatic and powerful poems, which begins, “My Life had stood—A Loaded Gun—[.]” Generations of critics have interpreted the poem in different ways, including, for example, that the “Owner” and “Master” who carries away the female speaker might be a lover who has released her pent-up energy. Charyn prefers to think of that loaded gun as her poetic gift, which has made her explode with a power readers have still not been able to reckon with. If there is an Emily Dickinson for the twenty-first century, it is because she is still well ahead of our understanding of her—and Charyn counts himself among her bemused followers. For Charyn, she is not the recluse of Amherst, retiring and timid, but instead a bold writer who needed the world far less than it has needed her. His Dickinson wrote for herself—and occasionally for family and friends—but not for posthumous fame or recognition. This sublime independence is part of what makes Dickinson great, and also makes her such a challenge to scholars and critics, who look for the key to her mythology, so to speak, and the wellspring of her biography.

Charyn’s book can be compared favorably to other recent books that might be called metabiographies, which concern how biographies are composed, generation by generation. I have in mind Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (2004) and Sarah Churchwell’s The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2005), books that do not merely assess earlier biographies, but also show how biography itself becomes a cumulative and incremental enterprise. Charyn is intrigued by the hermeneutics of biography and literary criticism. He is steeped in the work of Dickinson scholars and readers, including Christopher Benfey, R. P. Blackmur, Susan Howe, Thomas H. Johnson, Jay Leyda, Rebecca Patterson, Camille Paglia, Adrienne Rich, Richard Sewall, Marta Werner, and others. In a sense, for Charyn the poems are Emily Dickinson, the vital part of herself that as a woman in nineteenth-century Massachusetts she could only fully express by keeping to herself—not as someone shy of society so much as one who knew society simply could not reciprocate what she had to offer. In other words, Charyn’s Dickinson is not agoraphobic, not a neurotic, but a writer in charge of her destiny.

To Dickinson scholars, part of Charyn’s story will, of course, be familiar, especially the parts about how Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson tried to regularize Dickinson’s unorthodox lines—those dashes, for instance, that looked so jagged and unkempt to their conventional minds. The scholar hero of Charyn’s narrative is Jay Leyda, the dogged chronicler of Melville who did much the same for the poet in The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1960). Leyda revealed, for example, how important Dickinson’s dog, Carlo, was to her, and Charyn shows how the dog’s absence deforms the work of various biographers and critics:

Most Dickinson scholars have paid scant attention to Carlo, even though that big brown dog haunts her letters and her poems. Carlo isn’t even listed in the index of Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s six-hundred-page biography. And John Cody, who spends page after page analyzing Dickinson’s psychic dilemma as a love-starved woman and poet, mentions him only once. “Carlo seems to have accompanied Emily on all her rambles, and it is clear that she became fond of him.” But he finds no connection at all between Carlo and the poet’s “inner life.” I suspect that Carlo occupied more psychic and physical space than any other creature; she couldn’t have thrived without him. With all her aristocratic mien, she was little more than an expensive chattel who couldn’t even buy her own writing paper and pens without her father’s funds.

Charyn is not indulging in idle speculation. Dickinson owned this Newfoundland for sixteen years. She took the pet with her on social visits. In her letters she makes a point of identifying him as her companion. The dog probably weighed about 150 pounds and was as big as herself, as Dickinson claimed. “I started Early—Took my dog—” one of her poems begins, “And visited the Sea—[.]” In the poem, the speaker seems to become a creature of the enveloping sea until “The Sea withdrew—[.]” Charyn calls her a “poet-wanderer” and this poem “a reckless version of herself.” And why not? He adds, “[S]he can afford to be reckless in this poem—she has her dog.” There are almost as many entries in Charyn’s index for Carlo as there are for Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson’s impresario to her contemporaries. Unreconciled to Carlo’s death, Dickinson wrote to Higginson, “I wish for Carlo. I explore but little since my mute Confederate [died].” In fact, in Charyn’s words, the poet seemed to go “underground” when Carlo could no longer accompany her.

Reading Jerome Charyn sometimes evokes the sensation of seeing Dickinson arise from her poems, at once liberated from a domineering father, a purblind society, and even from the well-meaning ministrations of Higginson, Todd, and Todd’s daughter, Millicent. In Charyn, Dickinson emerges in the Manhattan peregrinations of Joseph Cornell, who puts the poet in his theater boxes as he communes with Jay Leyda about how adventuresome she was. Cornell constructed her in bits and pieces in imitation of Leyda’s “assemblages” of her life. “Cornell and Dickinson were intensely secretive and private souls. But she wasn’t ‘the eccentric, quivering, overstrung recluse’ that Deborah Solomon writes about in her 1997 biography of Cornell, nor was she trapped in her Amherst prison-house, as Rebecca Patterson would have us believe,” Charyn contends.

These quotations from Charyn might leave the impression that he goes out of his way to quarrel with biographers and critics. Not so. Just as often he shows how he has learned from them. But he is very good at showing how perceptions of artists get encrusted into the boilerplate of other biographies of other subjects. Thus, for example, biographers simply repeated a catechism about an obese, self-loathing poet when considering Amy Lowell, when in fact her life was a triumph—and a loving one, as well. Just so Charyn relieves Dickinson of her neuroses and gives her life back to her, treating her with a dignity and respect that decades of psychologizing have lacked.

Charyn is not aiming for new, definitive readings of Dickinson poems. Instead, he is about the work of enlarging the universe of her person and her poetry while he shows how much more there is still to do in fathoming her depths and contours. Too often criticism seems to drain the work it seeks to explicate. Charyn, on the other hand, revels in Dickinson’s elusiveness. He does not believe in solving her mysteries, but rather exhibiting how much more we have yet to encompass. After a perceptive account of the efforts to identify her image in daguerreotypes of doubtful provenance, he concludes, “She will continue to fuel our hunger and to baffle us, no matter how many portraits of her we uncover, or how many interpretations we have of every image. She’s still out there ‘opon Circumference,’ where she’ll always be hard to find.”

[Gmr · Rating 4 out of 5]

The truth can be hard to discern from fiction in this well written novel as it is apparent when taking a look at Ms. Dickinson’s life. Great care was taken to incorporate accurate details regarding places, times, people, and the like, making it almost an extension of those accounts we deem biographic in nature instead of a work of mere fancy. I for one am not usually for history laden stories; this time around I found the accuracy refreshing as I took a walk through a short history of the author’s life afterward via the net as a friend rather than an acquaintance. The author’s imagination was far from liberal except where liberties needed taking...such as her chance encounters with love and what may or may not have transpired.

Speaking of which, there seems to be many occurrences of late in works of a classic nature in which I am finding rather blush worthy situations. Here, Ms. Dickinson kindly refrains from being too brash choosing instead to make mention of ‘Vesuvius’ in scenes where the meaning can not help but be understand, though it is not always the same. It is easy to identify with Ms. Emily even through the trials of her fictitious life; her concerns are not so foreign, nor her passions and desires. The author did a wonderful job of creating a tangible life for this esteemed poetess.

When all is said and done, a truly enjoyable read with cover art that gets a raised eyebrow or two at times, but one certainly not to be missed. Whether you are a fan of the poetesses works or merely a rabid reader of fiction, this book combines a bit of both worlds so well in fact that they blend seamlessly (to my eye at least) together and may just leave you wishing to explore her life, times, and published works further upon reaching the final page. Recommended for older teens and adult readers. Happy reading!

[Cynthia Neale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Emily Dickinson is a favorite poet of mine and as a teen, I carried her verses with me as I wandered in the woods. When I bought this novel, I was eager to spend late nights inside Emily's imagined life. That I did, but with sadness and disappointment. It was as if a treasured friend became someone I had never really known. I felt duped and injured, but perhaps I've had Emily on a huge pedestal? There are so many invented love interests in Emily's life in this book that I began to think she was a nymphomaniac. Was the author also attempting to show that even in 19th-century sexually repressed society, there was sexual appetite and that the frustrated Belle of Amherst was denied this due to her overbearing, prominent father? No doubt, the Queen Recluse was passionate. How could she not have been? I would have enjoyed an escapade of one romance or two, but not a book-full that diminished my dear Emily. I had looked forward to getting into Emily's imagined psyche in first person narrative, but could not hear the familiar poet. Emily's voice was at times too silly and childish and without the music of her poems. And I wanted to know more about the writing of her poems through her voice. The author certainly tells it slant! Nevertheless, Jerome Charyn is a prolific and respected novelist and he studied the letters and poetry of Emily Dickinson. I can admit to "not getting it" and perhaps not being scholarly enough to appreciate this book. In spite of my complaints, there is lyricism, detailed and excellent depiction of the times in New England, and there were also moments when I captured enough of Emily's voice that got me hooked enough to want to finish the novel late into the night.

[Elise · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Whatever her turmoil, she was pleasuring herself with her own words" (from Charyn's "Author's Note," 12).

I thoroughly enjoyed "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson," and now that I have read it, I love Emily Dickinson and think of her even more as a kindred spirit than ever before. Charyn clearly took some liberties filling in the mysterious gaps of Dickinson's life as the "Queen Recluse" of Amherst, but I don't think he pushed the limits too far. In fact, anyone familiar with Dickinson's oeuvre has experienced and relished her passionate, obsessive, and wild side. My heart breaks for all of her unrequited loves, for her inability to please her father whom she loved madly, and for the light-sensitive headaches that prevented her later in life from doing what she loved most--reading and writing. I will think of her when I retire to my book cave because of a migraine on a blistering hot summer day, and from now on, I will read a few more books, and write a few more poems whenever I am able, and I will offer them up to Emily. Charyn's use of poetry and metaphor was intoxicatingly beautiful, moving, and emotionally true as he told Emily's story in her own voice, and he did it exquisitely. I only wish he had not interrupted in the transitional sections between chapters in his own expository voice, which unfortunately broke the spell he was so masterful at weaving. This book was at times slow, but it never failed to delight and surprise with its mad, fresh, hallucinatory use of language.

[Haley Mathiot · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is an enchanting piece of art. Charyn dives to the depths of Emily’s mind, traveling down “organized rabbit trails” of her random but poetic thoughts. Her character is distinctly unique, her story frightening but beautiful.

This book feels like hot chocolate going down—delicious, sweet, but surprisingly fiery, leading your thoughts here and there, but keeping the flavor of Emily in your mind the whole time.

Content and Recommendation: Emily’s experiences are not for “young” people, but it would be appropriate for ages 16+

[Josephine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Split into seven parts and 48 chapters, the 348-page novel is written from Emily’s point of view. If you want to get to know Emily Dickinson intimately, read this book and you’ll observe how imaginative and flirtatious she can be! You’ll also find yourself delved into her innermost thoughts and following her on daring adventures (daring for women of her time). Remember that it is her secret life and secrets can be scandalous, can’t they?

[Meg North · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel was like a tempest with my emotions, whipping them about from astonishment to frustration to satisfaction. It is not a book that makes me feel cozy, content, or at ease. I did not feel my heart swell in blissful teary happiness like I do at certain parts in "Jane Eyre". I didn't experience a bombastic adventure like when I read "Moby Dick" last year, lashed to Ishmael like a child and roiling on the ship's deck alongside him. I certainly wasn't strolling amongst the roses and contemplating the virtues of penniless good men versus greedy bad boys like I do with Jane Austen, her novels so quippy and satiric I smirk at every other line. It's not a book to tuck in my travel suitcase and relax with on an airplane.

It's a stormy book, like the lightning that inspires Emily to scribble her 'Verses.' If this is an accurate depiction of her personality, then she is like no other woman writer I've come across. Save for maybe that other wild Emily, the black-haired girl on the moors who dared write "Wuthering Heights" and died at the age of 30.

But this Emily of Amherst, the Queen Recluse, gives away no secrets and asks more questions than she answers. Through Jerome Charyn's eyes, she is and will always be the supreme American enigma. She never fully steps into her own life - she dances around others' stronger personalities, she slips softly down the hallway next to the rooms where the action is, she is a silent witness to the events of her time period, she wrestles with inner demons she never shares, she writes poetry she rarely reveals.

Even though she was a fantastic poet (and I honor her as one of the best female writers - period), my inner 19th century historian bristled. Perhaps I read too much of the Concord writers (Thoreau, Emerson, Louisa, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller), but I found myself asking - why didn't Emily get involved in the world around her? She was living in a time of massive upheaval socio-politically and culturally. It's the Civil War era, for goodness' sakes. Did not slavery, abolition, states' rights, Transcendentalism, the Temperance movement, or womens' rights get under her skin - at all? The hanging of John Brown, the Dred Scott case, Charles Sumner beaten in Congress, the passing of the 19th amendment, Lincoln's election, the horrific war itself ...

1850's Massachusetts, Emily's stomping ground, was a hotbed of social activity. Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott championed womens' rights. Louisa was the first woman to vote in Concord. Frederick Douglass was going from town to town rallying everyone to the cause. Every writer became involved, from Thoreau championing John Brown to Longfellow's son involved in the Civil War to Melville's battle poetry. Even a Quaker like Whittier wrote about the war, and Hawthorne's visit to the White House to visit Lincoln is an excellent portrait of the president. You could NOT escape the war. It was everywhere and affected everyone.

In the novel Emily's war begins in 1864, long after the first shots at Fort Sumter or the first dead boys at Bull Run. I found it the most frustrating absence in the book, for I longed to know how she felt about the whole shebang. Everyone else definitely had an opinion! The only true feeling was that she was upset her father paid $500 to have someone go fight in the place of her brother Austin. "Rich man's war, poor man's fight" became the phrase still echoed today.

As a historian, it ruffled my feathers to think an educated, intelligent lawyer's and Congressman's daughter would be as removed from the biggest American event of her lifetime as Charyn writes her to be. She is almost completely silent, which has me scratching my head. Was that Charyn's decision or is that the way she really was? I shall have to go a-digging and find out. It's a baffling mystery to me, and I must research that further.

The writing is the best part of the novel, and I encourage any would-be novelist to read it just to experience the turns of phrase, the descriptions, and the sheer inhabitance of being Emily Dickinson. I'm definitely the type of reader to go back and reread books, especially the amazing ones like this one. I struggled with massive novelist envy, not going to lie! This is not a relaxing book to read - it jumbles all your emotions - but you are in the hands of a literary master, and that brandishes its own awe. I spend so much time correcting other writers' sentences in my head as I read, that when I find a book where I don't do that, it becomes a favorite. This novel certainly lived up to a literary girl's expectation of brilliance and hope for good writing.

If the real Emily Dickinson had entered my brain long ago when I first read her Verses, then this Charyn Emily firmly cemented her enough to baffle me, confound me, frustrate me, and jam-pack my head with questions and more questions about her. I want to plunk her tiny white-dressed self in a chair and bombard her with firebolts because I want to know more!

Why did she start writing Verses to begin with? Who inspired her? In the novel, she talks a great deal about "Jane Eyre" and Charlotte Bronte, but what other books did she read? She mentions Shakespeare, but what kind of influence did he have on her? What was her favorite play of his? She mentions "Cleopatra," but what about others? And what about her creative process? It isn't just lightning in the brain, or is it? She writes so much about death and she experienced great loss in her life. The same themes come up over and over in her work ... But what can she teach me about writing that I cannot already glean from her Poems? I guess I can chalk it all up to Emily the enigma. But somehow, that is unsatisfying and confusing.

Or is my confusion about this novel a reflection upon my own expectations of her character, for I had always pictured a girl similar to Jane Austen in general wit and temperament? She has some things in common with Jane, like their mutual love of gardening and flowers, their general attitude towards writing, and the striking double-sister relationship they shared - Jane with Cassandra and Emily with Lavinia (Vinnie). Louisa May Alcott, for that matter, also had extremely close sisterly relationships. It was quite common in the 19th century, as per the 'separate spheres' lifestyle where ladies and gentlemen were brought up under completely different gender-specific circumstances. This might explain why I found Emily's relationship with Austin so distant and different.

I didn't 'like' Emily in the same sense that I like Jane Eyre or Lizzie Bennett or Jo March. She fascinated me, in much the same way her sister-in-law Sue fascinated her. The more I read, the more I longed to get closer, but she was forever hidden, peeping between sentences or slipping away after chapter endings. I couldn't quite catch on to her, despite her being quite distinctive. After reading Charyn's novel, who wouldn't recognize her and yet not know her at the same time? Emily the Enigma indeed.

To further the enigma, the novel doesn't reveal who really was a love in her life, outside of a made-up character named Tom who wouldn't fascinate a woman of her intelligence. I found him a poor match, uninspiring, and not as compelling as the men in other women writers' lives. She seemed more interested in his blond hair and blue eyes than any other feature, like his mental aptitude to match hers. Am I being too blunt when I say smart women seek smart men? It certainly is true for this writer! I liked the Brainard Rowe character more for this reason, and was sorry to see him disappear from her life. I had hoped he was the one in Boston, but it was Tom again.

The other fictional character, Zilpah Marsh, was a fascinating look into the downward spiral of a woman in 19th century Amherst ... but was she a good foil for Emily the enigma? Would the real Emily Dickinson have cared so much about someone like her? And if she did - did she also care about the contraband slaves escaping North through Massachusetts? Did she also care about helping women better their conditions, like Dickens helped the poor of London? Again, the lack of social awareness confounds me. Perhaps I can find other intelligent educated women like her who didn't notice or participate in the Civil War. It's mind-boggling to me.

I'm also intrigued about Emily's relationship with her mother, for it is the thinnest and most waifish in the novel. I couldn't pick her mother out of a lineup and after reading, don't really know what Emily thought of her mother. I've rarely met a woman who doesn't at least have a strong opinion about her mother one way or another. The relationship she had with her parents was so Father-heavy that her mother faded into the background. I found the absence strange and disturbing.

The novel's strongest chapters are its final ones, after the war when Emily violently struggles with a deep depression that worsens after her father's death. Her father was my favorite character, a stern man who had a complicated, shifting relationship with a daughter he simultaneously viewed as a helpless 'mermaid' and a fiercely intelligent extension of himself. He must have known she got the brains in the family and none of the reluctance to use them, unlike her brother Austin. After his death, Emily is haunted by his commands, which she dutifully followed in life.

But duty to a father, no matter how large he loomed in her mind as the 'earl' of Amherst, still does not explain why Charyn's Emily was the way she was. I can't make heads or tails of it. She has something to teach me, as a fellow writer and a woman of my favorite time period, but I'm still wrestling with what that is.

Would she want me to be both wild and dutiful, too? Would she want me to tiptoe around the rooms in which everything is happening? Would she want me to hang my heart on a man whose character was so disdainful? Would she want my pen to be silent about the current events in my time? I can't even tell if she liked being Queen Recluse or not. To be a recluse I'd have to shun variety of scene - and I could never! I'm far too restless.

While I struggle with Emily the Enigma Writer, I do recognize parts of myself in Emily the Enigma Personality. I can be wickedly blunt, and my childhood is littered with examples of headstrong back-talk to my parents. I have always been outspoken about something I feel passionately about. I loved the parts of the novel where she roamed about the hills and fields with her beloved Newfie Carlo, for I, too, have a life filled with canine companions who do not leave my side. I have stumbled and fallen into dark holes, beset on all sides from the crumbling debris of my own false beliefs.

I also spend an extraordinary amount of time with a poet, albeit of a completely different nature. For eight years, I have given tours at the Longfellow House in Portland. Henry grew up in a house similar to Emily, in a large family, with a lawyer for a father. Yet he participated in the life around him - was that because he was a man? He also formed such a strong bond with the young country's history that it's everywhere in his Verses. Henry the poet was no enigma. He easily reaches across the centuries - and Emily does not. She holds back.

So, may all who read this novel expect an exultation of Emily’s enigma-ness and not a revelation of her secrets. Charyn undertook an enormous task, and his literary talents speak for themselves. He succeeded in creating an unputdownable novel that was fiercely honest in its portrait of the subject, even if that subject is an enigma. I was fascinated right up until the last page, compelled to follow her journey from Holyoke to inner holy terrors.

I’ll pick it up again in five or six years, and see what I think then!

[CorLostForWords · Rating 4 out of 5]

Source: Received from publicist as part of the Tribute Books blog tour for The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. Many thanks goes to Nicole from Tribute Books for sending me a copy of this book for review. I received this book free of charge in exchange for an honest review.

My rating: 4/5

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson takes on the task of deciphering just what makes Emily tick, and gives us a glimpse of the reclusive life that she led. Although this is a work of fiction, it is a plausible interpretation of her life. Though I don't know much about Emily Dickinson, I do recall learning various facts about her from school, and while reading the book, I also did some research to refresh my memory. I enjoyed reading about Emily in this volume. I found The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson surprised me actually with how vivid it was, especially knowing that some works can be written with a voice that is too dry. This is not one of those books. Emily is a girl who wants to get married, and she is emboldened by her sharp wit. Her humorous and albeit dark lookout on life had me reading voraciously to see what knowledge I could glean from her.
It was interesting to see where history and fiction collides in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, and though I may not necessarily agree with some of the liberties taken, I do realize that this is fictional recreation of her life. As such, I applaud Charyn for creating such a vivid backdrop, and making history so real for those who may not enjoy reading about historical figures due to the fear of 'textbook syndrome'. It really was a captivating read, especially when you see how she was influenced by the writers of her era; to us, they are prestigious and influential, but back then, they were just evolving, and coming into their own. I wished more of Emily's work could have been captured in the book though, as it would have added more to the read. However it was neat to see how Currer Bell was brought to life, and how that affected women in writing, especially Emily.
All in all, a historical and fictionalized recounting of the life and times of the reclusive Emily Dickinson. I think many will either love or hate this read, based on their views of Emily in history, and the version of Emily detailed in this story. History is detailed fluidly in this book, and the voice, set in the 1800's, just adds to the descriptive quality. History comes to life, and will leave the readers questioning whether or not how true to reality this actually is. I'm glad I picked it up as it challenged my views and gave me an appreciation for life as a female authoress in those times.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, I have to admit some things up front. I have never been the world's biggest poetry fan, and I know next to nothing about Emily Dickinson's poetry. I know absolutely nothing about her life. So, I definitely did not open this book with the POV that I would in any way critique or chime in on whether or not the details of the story (or even the overall picture) are historically accurate.

The one thing I do know about her life is that as she aged, she grew increasingly eccentric without proper outlets to express herself. The prose of the book deteriorated along with Emily and I thought that was awesome. I'm not in any way saying the writing was ever bad (because it was gorgeous), but that the writing evolved along with the story.

Like I said, the writing was gorgeous. I think it was my favorite part of the book. One of my favorite things were the descriptions. I bookmarked a few examples:

Tom does not belong to the population of readers.

...Satan sings. Foul, with sulfer as his perfume, Satan is still a Poet.

I'm in too much of a tempest to taste a morsel. I haven't relinquished all the poison in my well. The venom courses through my veins.

I just love the lyrical voice of the language, fitting of a poet. Instead of simply stating "Tom couldn't read" or "I was still mad," the language paints a picture.

There were several points that I thought the story was dragging, but again, if I'd been more of an Emily fan I don't think I'd have ever been bored. Overall, I enjoyed seeing her from an angle I'd never have experienced from a study at school. Another thing I enjoyed was the historical context that I was literate enough to appreciate...the piece that sticks out the most being a debate on whether Currer Bell was a woman or a man. I loved seeing Jane Eyre discussed, especially since it was new at the time - I've never seen it discussed as anything but a classic.

Anyway, overall I recommend reading this as a solid historical novel with beautifully written language. Even though it was slow at times, it was never enough to make me want to set it aside. If you're at all a fan of Emily Dickinson and her poetry, I definitely thing you'll enjoy seeing her from a new perspective.

[Tony Laplume · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read six Jerome Charyn novels now. After every one of them, I get a better and better sense of his basic themes, and try to rephrase my findings every time. So that's how I'm going to start this review, too. Charyn's main characters tend to be melancholics who escape dwelling on their worst moods by fixating on key relationships, loves, and outlets they obsessively pursue.

The subject of this particular effort, obviously, is 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, who famously went mostly unpublished in her lifetime, preferring the life of a recluse. For the majority of the book, the reader might not even be aware that Emily is such a famous poet, because her writing takes a backseat to her relationships with family and ill-fated loves. Charyn's most interesting choice is to craft the majority of the story out of thin air, inventing wholesale a few key associations that serve to focus the lens of her life. It's also fair to say that without being explicit about it, Emily's relationship with her father was also meant to evoke the woman's role in society at that time, also reflected in the emerging phenomenon of female writers that she follows with great interest.

Charyn avoids Emily living inside her own head, although it certainly appears that she must have. One of his two fictional characters seems like the main character who would have existed in any other Jerome Charyn book, and Emily the red-headed object of affection that is another staple in all his books. This is the Charyn prototype from the other side, and it's interesting that he takes one of his rare excursions into a real person's life to do it. More often than not his books sprawl more than rollick, even though his characters themselves constantly rollick. If there's one knock on Secret Life, it's that Emily's rollicking sprawls more than is usual in Charyn's books.

But it's still good reading. Charyn is an undiscovered treasure, just as Dickinson was. Don't wait until after he's dead to discover him!

[Alice Bola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Up until I read this novel, I had no idea who Emily Dickinson was. I knew her name, I knew she was a writer but that was about it. I didn't know what to expect when I began The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. What I learned was that Ms. Dickinson was a complicatedly simple woman with a deep desire to love and experience life.

I enjoyed the time I spend with her. Jerome Charyn had incredible skill to give her a voice. His descriptions were so vivid. I loved the moxie Emily had, the humor in which she approached life. I love that she had a touch of the dramatics. I loved how real he made her. She was no longer this unknown woman who happened to be a poet in the 19th century. She was a woman who wanted so much from life, to explore to travel to see what the world had to offer.

I especially loved the way Mr. Charyn describes Emily's relationship with her father. She loved her father deeply and above all wanted his approval. I think she wanted him to accept her for who she was, flawed, insecure and perfect. In the end, I think she gets just that. If only that was enough.

I think this novel is a great read for those who love Emily Dickinson and her poetry. It's also a great way to discover her for the first time. This will definitely be a novel I will read again. The next time, I will have a book of Emily Dickinson's poems on hand.

And as for Mr. Charyn, I am looking forward to reading his other work. He has this beautiful ability to encompass the voice of whomever he becomes.

[Kristy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like this book. I'll admit, I started reading this book without much insight into the true life of Emily Dickinson, but as a fiction work, the character of Emily in this book was rather irritating. The drama of her mind was, well, blown out of reality, and I couldn't understand her thoughts very much. It was almost like a stereotype of a serious theater actor who is so overdramatic you just want to roll your eyes. You know what I did like? Her relationship with her father (a daddy's girl like me), her sister, and her dog. But the love of her life, a handyman she falls for in her school days, is one of the lower members of society and she just happens to run into him throughout her life...first as the handyman, then as her archenemy's criminal lover, then as an Army-deserting ruffian with a gang, then as a...circus clown in a traveling circus. And her archenemy, Zilpah? Strange, strange relationship with Emily. STRANGE. Emily should've just stayed away. And threw the yellow gloves at her. (I think the yellow gloves may have been a form of symbolism, but I just kept picturing janitor's gloves or dishwashing gloves and they were just too...important to the story for me to take seriously.) Anyways, it took me for-ev-ver to finish this book and I am SO glad I'm done with it. Another disturbing fact? Emily's possible homosexual tendencies towards women affecting her life, such as her grumpy sister-in-law.

[Bonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jerome Charyn's novel, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, describes Emily as michievous, witty,stubborn, brilliant and most astonishing, extremely interested in the male species. I love her poetry, but if you expect to read some of it in this book, get ready for disappointment. The author begins with her time at Mount Holyoke in the winter of 1847 where conditions were primative and emotionally numbing. There is nothing to do except chores and observing silence. Emily and a few other girls are holdouts on declaring their "love for God." She becomes obsessed with a handyman with blond hair and blue eyes who lives in a shack behind the school. This is our first glimpse of her interest in men. Emily contracts croup after spending time in the snow of an Amherst winter and her father sends her brother Austin to rescue her from, as her father calls it, "that dame school." Her father is protrayed as austere but loving toward his "Dolly."
Emily's chore at Holyoke was baking bread and she continues cooking for her father. The mother is afflicted with neurolgia and spends her time lying down.
Nothing new is brought to light except for her interest in men including historical and fictional ones.
If you have seen the Saturday Night Live skit with Emily in her white dress, hiding out from the world under her father's strict hand, you might learn she was much more audacious and lively tempered only when her eyesight began to fade.