The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
As the cover and title suggest, Jerome Charyn’s The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is a foray into the reclusive poet’s private life. Charyn uses his talent as a fiction writer (he’s written 30+ novels) to assume the voice and persona of Emily Dickinson. He tells the story in the first person, including snippets of Dickinson’s poems along the way. Though he adheres loosely to Dickinson’s true biography, Charyn invents several central characters, including Tom, the reappearing love interest. So far, the obsession Charyn’s Dickinson develops with Tom seems to be the novel’s biggest fault. Critics claim that the fictional poet appears flighty and neurotic when confronted with romance (as she is several times throughout the novel), and she loses the intelligence and curiosity that infuse her work. One critic even calls Charyn’s Dickinson “an embarrassment.” Still, the novel doesn’t claim to know Dickinson inside and out–when read as Charyn’s exploration of who Emily Dickinson might have been, the book is a fun experiment in language that caters to the voyeur in all of us.
“[S]adly, Charyn’s greatest risk, Emily’s voice, resembles a clotted mosaic, pieced together from bits of Charyn and shards of Dickinson.” – Caryn James, New York Times
“Through a perceptive reading of Dickinson’s verse and correspondence, [Charyn]‘s re-created her wild mind in all its erudition, playfulness and nervous energy.” – Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“I am pushed to say that the Emily Dickinson depicted in this novel is an embarrassment.” – Jane Juska, San Francisco Chronicle
“Charyn wisely makes Dickinson the narrator, allowing her to spin her oratorical web. We glimpse many different Emilys: the victim, the seeker of justice, the bold ingénue, a rebel, a saint, a sufferer of many deeply burning flames.” – Hillary Kelly, The New Republic
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