The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel - Softcover

Charyn, Jerome

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393339173 ISBN 13: 9780393339178

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Synopsis

"In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet and her great leaps of the imagination."―Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review

Jerome Charyn, "one of the most important writers in American literature" (Michael Chabon), continues his exploration of American history through fiction with The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, hailed by prize-winning literary historian Brenda Wineapple as a "breathtaking high-wire act of ventriloquism." Channeling the devilish rhythms and ghosts of a seemingly buried literary past, Charyn removes the mysterious veils that have long enshrouded Dickinson, revealing her passions, inner turmoil, and powerful sexuality. The novel, daringly written in first person, begins in the snow. It's 1848, and Emily is a student at Mount Holyoke, with its mournful headmistress and strict, strict rules. Inspired by her letters and poetry, Charyn goes on to capture the occasionally comic, always fevered, ultimately tragic story of her life-from defiant Holyoke seminarian to dying recluse. 9 black-and-white illustrations

About this title

From the Author:

She was the first poet I had ever read, and I was hooked and hypnotized from the start.  It was the old maid of Amherst who lent me a little of her own courage to risk becoming a writer. 

We had so little in common.  She was a country girl, and I was a boy from the Bronx.  She had a lineage with powerful roots in America, and I was a mongrel whose heritage was like an unsolved riddle out of Eastern Europe. 

Yet I could hear the tick of her music in my wakefulness and in my sleep. Suddenly that plain little woman with her bolts of red hair was as familiar to me as the little scars on my face.

"The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson" will be told entirely in Emily's voice, with all its modulations and tropes - tropes I learned from her letters, wherein she wears a hundred masks, playing wounded lover, penitent, and female devil as she delights and disturbs us, just as I hope my Emily will both delight and disturb the reader and take her roaring music right into the twenty-first century.

From the Inside Flap:

"There's nothing quite like a Charyn novel. . . . His sentences make a mournful and sensational clatter, like a bundle of butcher knives dropped on a cathedral floor." --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

Jerome Charyn has been writing some of the most bold and adventurous American fiction for over forty years. His ten-book cycle of novels about madcap New York mayor and police commissioner Isaac Sidel inspired a new generation of younger writers in America and France, where he is a national literary icon. Now, adding to his already distinguished career, Charyn gives us The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an audacious novel about the inner imaginative world of America's greatest poet. Channeling the devilish rhythms and ghosts of a seemingly buried literary past, Charyn has removed the mysterious veils that have long enshrouded Dickinson, revealing her passions, inner turmoil, and powerful sexuality.

The story begins in the snow. It's 1848, and Emily is a student at Mount Holyoke, with its mournful headmistress and strict, strict rules. She sees the seminary's blond handyman rescue a baby deer from a mountain of snow, in a lyrical act of liberation that will remain with her for the rest of her life. The novel revivifies such historical figures as Emily's brother, Austin, with his crown of red hair; her sister-in-law, Sue; a rival and very best friend, Emily's little sister, Lavinia, with her vicious army of cats; and especially her father, Edward Dickinson, a controlling congressman.

Charyn effortlessly blends these very factual characters with a few fictional ones, creating a dramatis personae of dynamic breadth.  Inspired by her letters and poetry, Charyn has captured the occasionally comic, always fevered, ultimately tragic story of Dickinson's journey from Holyoke seminarian to dying recluse, compulsively scribbling lines of genius in her Amherst bedroom. Rarely before has the nineteenth-century world of New England--its religious stranglehold, its barbaric insane asylums, its circus carnivals--been captured in such spectacular depth. Through its lyrical inflections and poetic rhythms, its invention of a distinct, twenty-first-century "Charynesque" language that pays remarkable homage to America's sovereign literary past, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson provides a resonance of such power as to make this an indelible work of literature in its own right.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393339173
• ISBN 13: 9780393339178
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352