Pale Shadows
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION
FEATURED ON LITHUB
CBC BOOKS:2024 SPRING FICTION PREVIEW
Dickinson after her death: a novel of the trio of women who brought Emily Dickinson’s poems out of the shadows
When she died, Emily Dickinson left behind hundreds of texts scribbled on scraps of paper. She also left behind three formidable women: her steadfast sister, Lavinia; her brother’s ambitious mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd; and his grief-stricken wife, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. With no clear instructions from Emily, these three women would, through mourning and strife, make from those scraps of paper a book that would change American literature.
From the author of Paper Houses, this is the improbable, almost miraculous, story of the birth of a book years after the death of its author. In these sensitive and luminous pages, Dominique Fortier explores, through Dickinson’s poetry, the mysterious power that books have over our lives, and the fragile and necessary character of literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Canadian writer Fortier returns (after Paper Houses) with a muddled novel about the aftermath of Emily Dickinson's death in 1886. Following the funeral, Emily's younger sister, Lavinia, who is the family's matriarch, discovers a treasure trove of her unpublished writing. Over the next few years, an artist named Mabel Todd, mistress of Austin Dickinson, Emily and Lavinia's older brother, embarks on the painstaking editing process that produced Poems by Emily Dickinson in 1890. Fortier tells the story in short chapters, mainly focusing on the family members' grief. There are bright and enchanting moments, such as the appearance of Mabel's intuitively perceptive young daughter, Millicent, whom Emily knew as a little girl. Fortier also portrays animosity between Lavinia, her sister-in-law, and Emily's best friend as a result of Austin's infidelity. Unfortunately, Fortier dances around the nuances of these characters' relationships and their impact on Dickinson's legacy, choosing instead to fill the narrative with Lavinia's ghostly projections: "No matter where she goes, Emily's ghost follows her, when she doesn't precede her. Diaphanous and evanescent in middle age, her sister has become the most lively of spectres." Even Dickinson diehards will be puzzled.
