Amherst
A Novel
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, “a wonderfully smooth, sinuous, enigmatic, and sexy tale of two love affairs” (Providence Journal) set in Amherst and illuminated by the presence of Emily Dickinson.
Alice Dickinson, a young advertising executive in London, decides to take time off work to research her idea for a screenplay: the true story of the scandalous, adulterous love affair between Emily Dickinson’s married brother, Austin, and a young, Amherst College faculty wife named Mabel Loomis Todd. Austin, twenty-four years Mabel’s senior and the college treasurer, lived next door to his reclusive sister, who allowed her home to be used for Austin and Mabel’s trysts.
Alice travels to Amherst, staying in the house of Nick Crocker, a married English academic in his fifties. As Alice researches Austin and Mabel’s story and Emily’s role in their affair, she embarks on her own affair with Nick, an affair that, of course, they both know echoes the one that she’s writing about.
Using the poems of Emily Dickinson throughout, historically accurate and meticulously recreated from their voluminous letters and diaries, “William Nicholson deftly weaves Mabel’s story with Alice’s, shedding light on the timeless longing, lust, and loneliness of love” (People). Amherst is a provocative and remarkable novel: “The poetry and history go down easy, the lovers fall hard, and the tragic, treacherous terrain of romantic entanglement is well explored” (Elle).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nicholson (The Trial of True Love) offers up a cinema-ready exploration of love and lust in New England past and present. Present-day heroine Alice, an aspiring screenwriter, travels from England to Amherst, Mass., to conduct research for her screenplay about Emily Dickinson's affair. Alice's own story which includes a passionate affair with a much older man alternates with the story of her historical subjects: Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, and his younger lover, Mabel, the married wife of an Amherst College professor. Their story suggests that Emily, who permitted the couple to liaise in her house, was herself obsessed with Mabel, who eventually championed the poet's work after Emily's death. The historical segments in many ways more vivid and lively than the somewhat melodramatic contemporary ones are well researched, although passages from the subjects' letters and diaries are injected awkwardly into the text. Both Austin and Mabel are complicated characters, and though there's nice balance between the dual narratives, one senses that Nicholson struggled with the dilemma of how to impose a fictional story onto real-life events.
