Gordon’s, instead, is a Dickinson of sharp and sour humour and of passionate, even earthy affections. Here is a Dickinson supremely confident in her poetic genius and not shy or afraid to publish — at various times, she bombarded publishers with poems, albeit she was painfully knocked by rejection.

Here, too, is a Dickinson who knew about sexual passion. The love of her life, Gordon argues, was Otis Phillips Lord, a judge in the Massachussetts Supreme Court who became a suitor after the death of his wife in 1877.

Her letters to Lord are rather more forthright than the legend of the Amherst spinster prepares you for: ‘when it is right I will lift the Bars, and lay you in the Moss’; ‘I confess that I love him — I rejoice that I love him — I thank the Maker of Heaven and Earth that gave him me to love — the Exaltation floods me — I cannot find my channel. The Creek turns Sea — at thought of thee… Incarcerate me in yourself.’

Even though Dickinson was 47 when she fell in love with Lord, the judge’s niece remembered her as a ‘little hussy’: ‘Loose morals… She was crazy about men. Even tried to get Judge Lord. Insane too.’

We’re still a way away, I think, from a general view of Emily Dickinson as a boy-crazed trollop: but by moving the general view a little way in that direction Lyndall Gordon has, oddly enough, done this great poet a favour.

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