I have been facinated by Emily Dickinson since I had a class with Roger Lundin in college. That was several years before he published a biography of Dickinson and I have always meant to get around to reading it and never have. (I have so many good intentions.)
Englewood Review of Books has a review of a recent historical fiction novel about Dickinson that sounds interesting.
Historical fiction is a daring enterprise, which is a polite way of saying that it borders on the foolhardy at one extreme and the arrogant at the other. If attempting to recreate a time and place neither author nor reader can visit to verify smacks of foolhardy hubris, then fictionalized autobiography might be something worse. However, after reading The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, the reader is glad author Jerome Charyn risked something worse to achieve something better: an engaging, intriguing, dreamscape creation of an Emily Dickinson who, if not the one who actually existed, leads a “œsecret life” we would wish for the reclusive bard of Amherst.
continue reading the rest of the review over at Englewood Review of Books