I Never Came to You in White
A Novel About Emily Dickinson
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Publisher Description
In 1847 Edward Dickinson’s daughter Emily was seventeen, a student at Mary Lyon’s female seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Thrilled by the challenges of her education, yet repressed by the school atmosphere, she began writing letters home and to the friends she felt lonely for----passionate letters that reveled in bubbling and irreverent mischief and declared the affectionate intensity of the budding poet. Later, after her death at the age of fifty-five, friends and relatives exchanged misunderstandings of the woman they had known----and of the poetic treasure that they had no sure way of evaluating.
Out of these sixty-six imagined letters, Judith Farr, herself a poet and Dickinson scholar, has created a brilliant novel, which, written in the language of Emily Dickinson’s contemporaries, lays out the entire emotional spectrum of her life. We see the young Emily groping toward poetic expression. We share the bewilderment of her teachers and friends as the girl reacts with the ingenuity of genius to people, books, and events. We marvel at her private letters “To a Mysterious Person.” We smile with her at the confusion of others as they struggle to keep up with the poet’s imagination, at those who try to “correct” her mode of expression. We share the experience of the first man to take her photograph. We watch her die, dreadfully and prematurely. When we are done, we have shared in a wondrous mystery, for we are the only ones allowed to know who Emily Dickinson was: these letters are written to us.
As Diane Wood Middlebrook has written, “This work of fiction---meticulously researched, delicately attuned to the language of the times---provides an explanation more persuasive than any biography ever will, of what happened to the girl on the brink of womanhood to make her the person who wrote those poems. A startling good read.”
“Peculiar, incandescent, astonishing”
-The New Yorker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sadly inadequate to its ambitious intent, this first novel attempts to bring Emily Dickinson to life via an epistolary format. When she was 17, Dickinson (1830-1886) spent a single year at Miss Lyon's Seminary, later Mount Holyoke College. Though little is known about this period of her life, Dickinson scholar Farr (The Passion of Emily Dickinson) strives for a composite portrait of the poet through a series of letters, some written during that year of 1847, others looking back on the poet's life after her death. The letters are so loaded with the facts of Dickinson's life, so heavy with digressions and so lacking in subtlety that they shriek of artifice. In particular, the correspondence between humorless Margaret Mann, Emily's English teacher at the seminary, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the poet's literary advisor and admirer, smacks of contrivance. The teacher tries to persuade Higginson of Emily's evil nature by relating her former student's "misdeeds," including the girl's blasphemous reference to the Bible as a work of literature and her refusal to "declare for Christ.'' In Emily's defense are Higginson's replies to Mann and letters the poet is imagined to have written to her brother Austin and childhood friends. Farr's perception of Dickinson is not surprising: she is an intense young woman who dares to question blind obedience to God, is passionate in her devotion to others, playful with language, irreverent and beyond most of her acquaintances' understandings. Most readers, however, will find her as trying as do most of her contemporaries. Farr does better with background detail, conveying the religious and social mores of the time. In an afterword, she sorts fact from fiction, detailing the poet's actual relationships with the novel's characters and specifying which poems are authentic and which she has "blasphemously but lovingly improvised." Farr's affection is obvious, but her portrait gives us stock figures who lack the dimensions of reality. Film, audio rights: Thomas D'Evelyn Agency.