Emily Dickinson’s Secret Life

Not a recluse in her personal life, before the rights to her poems created feuds between her close associates, the poet’s life was complicated by a love triangle she initiated with a married man. “Sly and diamond-brilliant in their capacity for revealing the human condition in the fewest words, the nearly 2,000 poems Dickinson wrote in her upstairs bedroom in Amherst, Mass., remain shocking in their incisiveness even now…Amid all the triangulation was Emily herself, who managed — in an awesome feat of control that belies the popular image of her as a neurotic dreamer…She was far more fierce than we’ve been led to believe, which makes perfect sense given the work she left behind.”