The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson Blog Tour

Blog Tour Schedule

2010-12-21T12:46:00.001-08:00

February 2011 - Confirmed Blog Tour Dates

February 1st
The Allure of Books
click link to read the posted review

February 2nd
The Bluestocking Guide
click link to read the posted review

February 2nd
Broken Teepee
click link to read the posted review

February 4th
The Book Tree
click link to read the posted review

February 4th
One Person's Journey Through a World of Books
click link to read the posted review

February 7th
Cynsights
click link to read the posted review

February 8th
Moonlight, Lace and Mayhem
click link to read the posted interview

February 8th
QG's Book Reviews
click link to read the posted review

February 9th
The Book Bee
click link to read the posted review

February 10th
Rex Robot Reviews
click link to read the posted review

February 10th
Clandestine Sanctuary
click link to read the posted review

February 12th
Fingers & Prose
click link to read the posted review

February 13th
Reading Between the Lines
click link to read the posted review

February 14th
A Little Hope
click link to read the posted review

February 14th
Rundpinne
click link to read the posted review

February 15th
Book Reviews by Molly
click link to read the posted review

February 16th
Sharon's Garden of Book Reviews
click link to read the posted review

February 18th
Ascroft, eh?
click link to read the posted review

February 18th
Books & Needlepoint
click link to read the posted review

February 18th
BookSexyReview.com
click link to read the posted review

February 18th
Crazed Mind
click link to read the posted review

February 19th
Literary R&R
click link to read the posted review

February 19th
Must Read Faster
click link to read the posted review

February 19th
Regis Schilken Writes
click link to read the posted review

February 20th
Cheryl's Book Nook
click link to read the posted review

February 20th
Tiffany's Bookshelf
click link to read the posted review

February 21st
Teresa's Reading Corner
click link to read the posted book spotlight

February 21st
The True Book Addict
click link to read the posted review

February 22nd
Knits & Reads
click link to read the posted review

February 22nd
Snoring Scholar
click link to read the posted review

February 24th
Flying Off the Shelves
click link to read the posted review

February 24th
Reading for Sanity
click link to read the posted review

February 24th
Satisfaction for Insatiable Readers
click link to read the posted review

February 25th
The Alcove
click link to read the posted review

February 25th
Authors by Authors
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February 25th
Books, Movies, Reviews! Oh My!
click link to read the posted review

February 25th
Lost for Words
click link to read the posted review

February 27th
The Book Connection
click link to read the posted review

February 28th
Devourer of Books
click link to read the posted review

February 28th
Lifetime Reading Plan
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February 28th
Tic Toc
click link to read the posted review

PREVIOUSLY POSTED:

The Englewood Review of Books
click link to read the posted review

The Life (and Lies) of an Inanimate Flying Object
click link to read the posted review

Tribute Books Reviews & Giveaways
click link to read the posted review

Video - Jerome Charyn talks about "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson"

2010-12-21T12:29:00.000-08:00

Reviews

2010-12-21T12:00:00.000-08:00

From Publishers Weekly

The inner life of Emily Dickinson was creatively effulgent, psychologically pained and emotionally ambivalent, as reported by Charyn, who here inhabits the mind of one of America's most famous poets. Charyn parrots the cadent voice of razor-sharp Dickinson, beginning in her years as the tempestuous young lyricist who aims to choose my words like a rapier that can scratch deep into the skin. From the first page, witty Emily harbors conflicted feelings toward her female status: her esteemed father, the town's preeminent lawyer, adores Emily at home for her intellectual companionship, but also dismisses her formal education as a waste of money & a waste of time, and it's easy to see how Emily's poetic instincts are born from the shifting sensations of comfort and resentment brought by a childhood spent serenading Father with my tiny Tambourine. Emily's growth is brightly drawn as she progresses from petulant child to a passionate woman with a ferocious will and finally to that notorious recluse. However, while this vivid impersonation is a stylistic achievement, it's also confining and limits higher revelations. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Charyn carefully adheres to the known facts of Dickinson's life, and he has a thorough knowledge of her poems and letters, the strains of which echo through his clever and elegant prose. Despite these qualities, the critics' reactions were tepid and unenthusiastic. They collectively took issue with his characterization of Emily as fickle, unstable, and promiscuous--hardly the makings of a perceptive and profound writer. The Washington Post denounced Charyn's choice to exclude Dickinson's poems from the narrative as a "damnable omission," and the San Francisco Chronicle derisively labeled the novel a "bodice-ripper." Readers who cherish Dickinson and her astonishing legacy may find the heroine of Secret Life supremely unsettling; those unacquainted with her should perhaps start with a biography like Brenda Wineapple's White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higgins (HHHH Nov/Dec 2008).

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Versatile and puckish Charyn extends his rascally improvisations on American history, following the Revolutionary War–era Johnny One-Eye (2008) with an audacious take on the life and spirit of Emily Dickinson. In his author’s note, Charyn explains his fascination with the poet and, most importantly, her “fiercely imagined life.” In a voice as precise and unnerving as that of her revolutionary poems, Dickinson narrates with droll wit, bemused rhapsody, and acid fury, often mockingly describing her redheaded self as a bird, mouse, kangaroo, spinster, “Uncle Emily,” and the Queen Recluse. Now and then, she alludes to the inner lightning strikes that prompt her to write, but flinty Dickinson focuses most on her knotty relationship with her father, her adoration for her dog, infatuation with her volcanic sister-in-law, and abiding, impossible love for Tom, the tattooed handyman turned thief. Bawdy, intrepid, and passionate, Dickinson ponders the shackles of women’s lives and class prejudice as she shares her surprisingly wild adventures. In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet and her great leaps of the imagination, liberating Dickinson from the prim and proper cameo image of a repressed lady in white, and revealing just how free she truly was. --Donna Seaman

Among Charyn's writerly gifts is a dazzling energy -- a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain.
- Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Review of Books

Charyn tells the truth, but tells it slant . . . He has re-created her wild mind in all its erudition, playfulness and nervous energy.
-- Ron Charles in The Washington Post

In Jerome Charyn's cleverly irreverent novel . . . Emily sneaks out of her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, on clandestine missions, and falls in love with men she cannot have.
--The Daily Beast

In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet . . . liberating Dickinson from the prim and proper cameo image of a repressed lady in white, and revealing just how free she truly was.
--Booklist

Charyn excels most at drawing from Dickinson's rich poetic legacy to trace the ebb and flow of her life . . . compelling portrait of Emily Dickinson as an intelligent young woman writing on scraps of paper.

--Paula L. Woods in Los Angeles Times

“Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.”
—The New Yorker

“Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature.”
—Michael Chabon

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is astonishing. Charyn gives Emily Dickinson a new life, and one with a rush of energy and power. I shall never see her or her poetry in the same way again.
- Frederic Tuten, author of Adventures of Mao on the Long March

In his breathtaking high-wire act of ventriloquism, Jerome Charyn pulls off the nearly impossible: in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson he imagines an Emily Dickinson of mischievousness, brilliance, desire, and wit (all which she possessed) and then boldly sets her amidst a throng of historical, fictional, and surprising characters just as hard to forget as she is. This is a bold book, but we'd expect no less of this amazing novelist.
- Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

“I never heard Emily Dickinson’s voice, but Jerome Charyn’s novel convinces me that this is the nineteenth-century genius woman poet, actually telling her story. . . . A tour de force by a major American novelist.”
—Herbert Gold, author of Still Alive: A Temporary Condition

“Jerome Charyn is merely one of our finest writers, with a polymorphous imagination and crack comic timing. Whatever milieu he chooses to inhabit, his characters sizzle with life and his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.”
—Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

“Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer—so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.”
—Tom Bissell, author of God Lives in St. Petersburg

Read Chapter One

2010-11-26T11:15:00.000-08:00

Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
South Hadley, 1848

Tom the Handyman is wading in the snow outside my window in boots a burglar might wear. I cannot see the Tattoo on his arm. It is of a red heart pierced by a blue arrow if memory serves, & if it does not, then I will let Imagination run to folly. But I dreamt of that arm bared, so help me God, dreamt of it many a time. We are not permitted to talk to Tom. Mistress Lyon calls him our own Beast of Burden. She is unkind. Tom the Handyman is no more a beast than I am.

If he lights our stove or repairs the windowsill or bevels the bottom of our door, our vice principal, Rebecca Winslow, has to be in the room with him, & we poor girls have to run to Seminary Hall so that we will be far from Temptation. But I wonder who is the tempter here, Tom or we? There are close to three hundred of us—if you count the Misses Lyon and Winslow, & our seven Tutors, & Tom, the only male at Mt Holyoke. Heavens, I’d as lief call him Sultan Tom & ourselves his Harem. But Mistress would expel me in a wink dare I whisper that. And Tom is a sultan who depends on crumbs. He lives in the shed behind our domicile, a place so dark & solitary that a cow would die of loneliness were it trapped inside. He cannot come to the table when we dine, but must feed on whatever scraps are left. My room-mate, Cousin Lavinia, sneers at him, says Tom reeks of sweat. She is a Senior & cannot stop thinking of her suitors. Lavinia has hordes of them, the sons of merchant princes & potentates or boys from Amherst College who would love to sneak onto the grounds & serenade their Lavinia, but could not get past Tom & so have sent her half a mountain of Valentines. She is positively engorged with them.

“Cousin,” says she, after cursing Tom, “how many notes from Cupid have you received so far?”

“None.”

“That’s a pity, because I’d opine that a girl hasn’t lived at all until she has a hundred beaux.”

There never was a show-off like Emily Lavinia Norcross. But I’d start a war between our families if I bludgeoned her.

Mistress Lyon summoned us to the assembly hall. She stared at us all, the perpetrators and the innocent parties. “I forbid you to send off those foolish notes. I will not tolerate such frivolities. We do not celebrate Valentine’s Day at Holyoke.” And she promised to dispatch Miss Rebecca to the Post Office to discover if anyone dared challenge her decree. But she did not interfere with the Valentines that kept arriving like missiles, as if any letter that had already been franked were a sacred thing. She wanted our election, and would suffer nothing less. The girls of Mt Holyoke had to avail themselves to be the little brides of Christ, & said brides did not scribble Valentines harum-scarum to the boys of Amherst. The sign of our election was a dreamy gaze into the atmosphere & strict attention to our calisthenics. But I was consigned to Hell, though I had never received nor sent one paltry Valentine. And Lavinia, with her half mountain, was a member of the elect who had discovered God in Mistress Lyon’s sitting room, had prostrated herself & prayed. But my mind would always drift during Devotions, & I’d think of Tom’s Tattoo. Tom had become my Calvary.

Lord, I do not know what love is, yet I am in love with Tom, if love be a blue arrow & a heart that can burn through skin and bone. Tom and I have never spoken. How could we? Mistress Lyon would have him hurled across the grounds if ever he dared address a bride of Christ. Still, I watch him in the snow, sinking into perilous terrain, rising in his burglar’s boots only to sink again & again, as if in the grip of some bad angel who would not leave Poor Tom alone. I pit him caught in the cold without a cup of beef tea. And how can a sinner such as myself help the Handyman? Soon he will start to sneeze & have a monstrous coughing fit & I will wonder if Tom is weak in the lung.

Holyoke does not believe in hired help. We girls make our own beds & have our individual chores. I am the corporal in charge of knives—no, the animal trainer, since knives are part of my menagerie, like tigers & tigresses, though I never call them such. I distribute the knives during meals & wash them in our sink. Mistress does most of the cooking, & until recently had her own pair of burglar’s boots. But she can no longer do the heaviest chores. Her ailing back will not permit her to collect the trash or repair stovepipes & pump handles. So Tom is on the premises by sufferance alone & Mistress pretends not to see him as much as she can. Pointless to send him notes. Tom does not belong to the population of readers. And no one amongst the faculty will deign converse with our Handyman. Miss Rebecca has taught herself to instruct Tom with a form of sign language & a few gruff shouts. If she wants him to repair the water pump, she performs a little pantomime. She gurgles for a moment, weaves around Tom as if she were a well, then stiffens into pipe or pump handle, & before she’s done, the Handyman has grabbed his tool box & disappeared into that spidery land below the sink.

But there are no Tutors in the snow to interfere with Tom as he rises and sinks like a burglar. I do not have an inkling of why he is out in that little Siberian winter beside Holyoke Hall. The wind is fierce & there is such a howling that the Lord Himself would take cover, though Mistress Lyon might call me a blasphemer for having said so. She, I’m sure, would declare that God can traverse the snow without tall boots. But that still does not explain Tom’s leaping about. Is our Tom constructing his own crooked path for the butcher & grocer? But why would they cross Siberia when there is an open passage to the front gate that Tom shovels every morning at six? Harum-scarum, it is the mystery of Holyoke Hall.

Then I catch the melody of Tom’s design. He is not on a meandering march. He is searching in the snow. He sinks again, & I fear that Siberia has swallowed him until he rises up with a creature in his arms, a baby deer frozen with fright, looking like an ornament on some cradle & not a live thing. It must have wandered far from its family & panicked in the snow. Lord, I cannot see its eyes. But Tom the Handyman keeps the stunned doe above his head & tosses it into the air as you would a sack. And what seems like an act of consummate cruelty isn’t cruel at all. The doe unlocks its legs and starts to leap. What a silent ballet before my eyes! A baby deer gliding above the snow, conquering our little Siberia in half a dozen leaps, & disappearing into the forest, while Tom watches until the doe is safe.