Booklist has a starred review for the new bio of Emily Dickinson and it sounds like something amazing. (The title alone is pure genius.) Here's a bit on Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickson and Her Family's Feuds by Lyndall Gordon:

Forever vanquished is the pallid icon of Emily Dickinson as the reclusive virgin saint of Amherst. In The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010), Jerome Charyn imagines the poet as an adventurous, sexy rebel, and now Gordon, biographer of Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft, explodes all previous theories in an electrifying family portrait. It wasn’t heartbreak that kept the poet sequestered, Gordon argues with high-beam cogency, it was epilepsy, a then-uncontrollable and shameful malady. With one stroke, Gordon recasts Dickinson’s entire oeuvre. She then reveals the outrageous treachery of the poet’s esteemed brother, Austin, who held his unmarried sisters, wife Susan, and their children hostage to his passion for his ambitious mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, whose scheming husband encouraged the affair. So much for New England decorum and restraint. With trysts in Lavinia and Emily’s cherished home and sanctuary, Mabel’s escalating demands, and Austin’s utter callousness toward his family, a great feud was born. And on it raged long after Emily’s death as the irrepressible, multitalented Mabel deciphered, typed, and published Dickinson’s poems.

Hmmm - sounds mighty intriguing and way more appealing the the rather pathetic image of Emily that I was taught. (How come the male writers I learned about were always out carousing and the ladies were always sitting in a room somewhere? My teachers even managed to make Zelda Fitzgerald abundantly pathetic - and somehow we never even got to Martha Gellhorn when learning about Hemingway.) (Speaking of Gellhorn - did you hear that Clive Owen & Nicole Kidman are slated to play them the upcoming Hemingway & Gellhorn for HBO?)

Also, Oxford University Press has a bio coming out this fall on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I am ever so hopeful that this one will be interesting and not too terribly academic. (I find that OUP can go either way on this sort of thing - not that there's anything wrong with academic it's just not my cup of tea.) Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is by far one of the most amazing pieces of literature I have read and to find out just how much it paralleled her own life will make for rich reading indeed. A bit of Wild Unrest by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (this is catalog copy I'm afraid as it is not out in the world being reviewed yet):

"The Yellow Wall-Paper" captured a woman's harrowing descent into madness and drew on the author's intimate knowledge of mental illness. Like the narrator of her story, Gilman was a victim of what was termed "neurasthenia" or "hysteria"--a "bad case of the nerves." She had faced depressive episodes since adolescence, and with the arrival of marriage and motherhood, they deepened. In 1887 she suffered a severe breakdown and sought the "rest cure" of famed neurologist S. Weir Mitchell. Her marriage was a troubled one, and in the years that followed she separated from and ultimately divorced her husband. It was at this point, however, that Gilman embarked on what would become an influential career as an author, lecturer, and advocate for women's rights.

What really gets me interested in this one is that the author did a ton of research not just on Gilman's journals, letters, etc but also on the diaries of her husband and looked into the work of "S. Weir Mitchell, whose rest cure dominated the treatment of female "hysteria" in late 19th century America."

With all the ongoing arguments over women's rights in this country (and who is a "real" feminist - although using the word feminist is apparently scary to some), I think it's quite timely to find out just what life was like for women in the late 19th century. Can you imagine being told to lay immobile for weeks at a time for your own good? How long would it take any of us to lose our ever loving minds? (This makes me think a bit of Deborah Noyes' Captivity which I reviewed this month for Bookslut. While it is not about being sent to you bed, it is about the limited choices for women in that era and how much you were controlled by society.) (This all makes me want to go watch Miss Potter again, by the way.)

[Post pics by Francesca Woodman who committed suicide in 1981 at age 22 after becoming depressed at the end of a relationship. What a tragic waste. I couldn't help but think they applied to both these ladies...in different ways.]