Lives Like Loaded Guns
Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds

by Lyndall Gordon

      Emily Dickinson is a familiar name to everyone who went to school in the United States. Dickinson was a revered poet whose work is required reading in middle and high school. Author Lyndall Gordon’s biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds, is not for those who like their reading fast paced. Why? The book is written in minute detail as Gordon attempts to explain Dickinson's frame of mind as she wrote letters and poems. 

What I noticed most, was how much Dickinson wanted fame and immortality, something Gordon mentions right in the introduction to the book. Basically, because the Dickinsons were Puritans, and it was a century in which women were owned by men, the only freedom women had was to write letters to each other. Gordon purports that Dickinson's writing was a means of controlling her situation(s) in a world where men controlled women. Yet, Dickinson wrote letters that were more like arias, like exercises in composition for her poetry; suggesting her real goal was to establish control over her world with her writing. 

It was known that Dickinson never married, but she flirted, in her letters and poems, with men who were married as she attempted to force them to play the part of a husband to her. For example: Sam Bowles, a family friend, lived close to the Dickinson homestead and visited the family many times without his ailing wife Mary. Dickinson and her sister Lavinia exchanged much correspondence with him. Dickinson's letters to Bowles were addressed to “master” as if he was her husband. Bowles kept the letters and poems away from his wife Mary.  

Something else I noticed in Gordon's book was how she referred to Dickinson as being exacting; using incorrect spellings and long dashes that Gordon referred to as symbolism, which allowed the readers to finish Dickinson's thoughts on their own. Much of this was because Dickinson included so much imagery of the spiritual world in her letters and poems. Dickinson's writing was her way of compelling readers to share her view of the world. 
 
On another note, Dickinson's family had feuds over just about anything. From who should marry who, to who reigns over the family, to the war between the different Dickinson households and their relatives, to the two daughters’ battles and the infamous trial over Austin Dickinson’s (Emily’s brother) will, in which Maggie Maher, their servant,  “handed the Dickinsons a loaded gun” to use against Mabel Todd, Austin’s mistress.

Overall, if you enjoy reading biographies about the obscure lives of individuals, then I think you’ll find that Lyndall Gordon did a good job of explaining Emily Dickinson in Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds.