'The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson'
Review by Nancy (my friend) The Secret life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn Emily Dickinson, one of America's most beloved poets, was an unusual gal! She had impure thoughts, tried her teachers sorely, loved her father (possibly more than was healthy?), imagined sitting on the laps of many men and was the source of an amazing tale of her years in Massachusetts. It begins at Holyoke, a school for young women with the precise intent of creating new nuns, it seems. There she becomes infatuated with Tom the handyman. It was the beginning of Miss Emily's frivolous thoughts but certainly not the end. We read how she is a master baker, never published while her father was alive and how her entire family could have been the basis for many a reality show. Emily worked hard and loved harder - in her mind only, of course as we are talking about the mid 1800's. Her father is on the Board of Amherst College. Emily has suitors, for all that she is quite small and plain and her sister...