View All Results
  • Books
  • Gifts
  • Authors
  • News
  • Win
  • Newsletters
  • Industry
  • Getting Published
    1. Books
      2. /
    2. Lyndall Gordon
      3. /
    3. Lives Like Loaded Guns

    Imprint

    • Virago

    Related

    Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

    Lyndall Gordon

    Formats & Editions

    Though in her lifetime only ten of Emily Dickinson's poems were published, her death revealed 1,789 poems, many of them in hand-sewn booklets, secreted in a locked chest. She is now regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time, but she has come down to us as a woman disappointed in love, an odd and pathetic woman who dressed in white and shut herself away. Lyndall Gordon sees instead her volcanic character - 'a soul at White Heat' - a mystic and lover whose family harboured a hothouse drama of sex, scandal and devastating betrayal.

    Emily Dickinson was a woman beyond her time who found love, spiritual quickening and immortality all on her own terms: she wrote 'My Life had Stood - a Loaded Gun'. Here is an explosive genius.

     Read More

    More books by Lyndall Gordon
    The Hyacinth Girl
    Lyndall Gordon
    The Hyacinth Girl
    Outsiders
    Lyndall Gordon
    Outsiders
    Divided Lives
    Lyndall Gordon
    Divided Lives
    The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot
    Lyndall Gordon
    The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot
    Henry James
    Lyndall Gordon
    Henry James
    Charlotte Bronte
    Lyndall Gordon
    Charlotte Bronte
    Virginia Woolf
    Lyndall Gordon
    Virginia Woolf
    Vindication: A Life Of Mary Wollstonecraft
    Lyndall Gordon
    Vindication: A Life Of Mary Wollstonecraft
    Shared Lives
    Lyndall Gordon
    Shared Lives
    Lyndall Gordon

    Lyndall Gordon

    Lyndall Gordon was born in Cape Town and studied American Literature at Columbia University in New York. She came to England through the Rhodes Trust in 1973.

    She is the prize-winning author of biographies including The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot; Henry James: His Women and his Art; Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life; Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft; Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds and Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World. There are also two memoirs, Shared Lives, A Story of Women's Friendship, and Divided Lives, about her mother, whose spiritual journey opened up Eliot's poetry for her. She has written the 'Life' for the Eliot website: tseliot.com.

    Lyndall Gordon is a fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Oxford.

    More about Lyndall Gordon

    Related books

    Hachette Australia acknowledges and pays our respects to the past, present and future Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuation of cultural, spiritual and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Our head office is located on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.

    This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

    © Hachette Australia, All Rights Reserved · Site by Chook