Lives Like Loaded Guns Quotes

“In Maine during the summer of 1920 they rowed around Hog Island to the side facing the open ocean, and here he asked her to marry him. She was emotionally dead, she confessed. He didn’t seem to mind.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“the fragrant pinewoods on one side of the road; a blueberry patch on the other. It was as though the positions of each plant and each cloud in the sky pierced her consciousness”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Mabel likened Lavinia’s hand to a demented spider who has fallen into an inkwell.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“reprieve of roses!”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Mabel’s skills as an actress who is the first to believe her words as they issue from her mouth.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“their voices too low to disturb the birds singing in the tall cherry trees.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Austin’s ‘entire disappointment’ in the marriage, and his entrapment, as a fly caught in a spider’s web.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“A wreath of white daisies from the Dickinson meadow were the only flowers allowed.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“So I keep bringing these — / Just as Night keeps fetching stars”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“You have seen flowers at morning satisfied with the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun; think you these thirsty blossoms will now need nought but — dew? No, they will cry for sunlight, and pine for the burning noon, tho’ it scorches them,”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Her coolness would have been all the more provocative clothed in the demure, doll-like corset and full skirt of the 1850s. Provocative, too, the sheath of black, in which she moved, an unpierced seal of grief.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“she had been painstaking in her scholarship, re-copying from manuscript instead of relying on her mother’s transcriptions, but in the many instances of poems jotted illegibly on cast-off scraps (on the inside of used envelopes—a favourite source of paper—on tiny bits of stationery pinned together, on discarded bills, on invitations and programmes, on leaves torn from old notebooks, on brown paper bags, on soiled, mildewed subscription blanks, on drugstore bargain flyers, on a wrapper of Chocolat Menier, on the reverse of recipes, on shopping lists and on the cut-off margins of newspapers),”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Austin required all reference to sickness be cut. Consistent with secrecy was the refusal of the Norcross sisters to let Todd see the letters in their possession. These remaining witnesses to Emily’s ills in her teenage years, and to the treatment she endured in Boston in 1864 and 1865, shielded their cousin”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“The only secret people keep is ‘Immortality’, Dickinson once said. Immortality is the mystery at the core of her story.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Obscuring the drama of Emily Dickinson’s legacy have been the dustheaps of slander and sentimental conjecture that fortified the battlers in the war between the houses.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“This has been a story of the buried life after all: Emily and Austin and Vinnie firing up at the spark Mabel touched off when she flirted with Austin’s buried passions and intruded on the Homestead and coveted the shadow-world of Sue and Emily. But to touch off that spark was Austin’s doing as well as Mabel’s. The feud was not wholly something that was done to the Dickinsons but was in some sense a sequel to what they were.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“In Dickinson terms, he epitomised the absurd ‘Somebody’, the anti-type to a ‘Nobody’ like the poet herself. Ironic that a creature so incapable of effacement should contrive to link his name to hers. Above all, Montague was bent on the glory of the grand public gesture. He wanted the kudos he was bound to have as sole donor of a collection remarkable for the fact that a poet of her stature had been unpublished in her lifetime. Her manuscripts had never been seen; her reclusive life tantalised the public; and many mysteries waited to be uncovered.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Her edition, though, did make two errors, acceptable at that time: as her mother had done before her, she imposed titles on untitled poems and she standardised punctuation, not grasping how vital Dickinson’s punctuation may be to the way we read her.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“in terms that ignored the claims of the Dickinson camp: she had been painstaking in her scholarship, re-copying from manuscript instead of relying on her mother’s transcriptions, but in the many instances of poems jotted illegibly on cast-off scraps (on the inside of used envelopes—a favourite source of paper—on tiny bits of stationery pinned together, on discarded bills, on invitations and programmes, on leaves torn from old notebooks, on brown paper bags, on soiled, mildewed subscription blanks, on drugstore bargain flyers, on a wrapper of Chocolat Menier, on the reverse of recipes, on shopping lists and on the cut-off margins of newspapers), the editor had been daunted for a long time and it was only in the last three years that she had brought herself to decipher these.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Bolts of Melody, with more than six hundred unknown poems by Emily Dickinson, took the public by surprise in 1945.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“On the contrary, she and Harper gained the support of Alexander Lindey, an authority on copyright law for the Library of Congress. He argued that to publish these poems was in the public interest. He also considered it questionable for Mattie to pass on rights to a non-member of family. Hampson continued to threaten but had not the means or will to fight a legal battle.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“she declared that speculation had no place in this book that had ‘in fact one purpose: to allow Emily Dickinson to speak for herself’. In this way, Todd disclaimed possession in a publication whose prime motive was, in actuality, an act of possession. Without referring to Mattie, it shot Mattie’s version of her aunt’s life to pieces with well-aimed rhetorical questions: who can know what Dickinson felt for others? Who can know what was momentous?”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Mabel Todd took the offensive with her expanded edition of the Dickinson letters. Her preface presented it as the first book ever issued about Emily Dickinson, prepared at the requests of the poet’s brother and sister: Austin Dickinson, Lavinia Dickinson ‘and I’ collected letters ‘which they entrusted to me’ to edit and publish. At a stroke, this authorised editor displaced an unauthorised niece.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Here another myth was imposed on the poet: this time, a tyrannical father.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“In 1931 Mabel bought a carton of Roberts Brothers archives, which had been thrown out as waste paper for the mills but salvaged by a book hunter. The carton contained the whole of the Dickinson publishing papers, including the draft and final contracts in 1894.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“In the 1880s the focus of the feud had been adultery; in the 1890s the focus shifted to the divided treasure the poet had left behind. Who had the right to possess her? Who had the right to say what she was?”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“This blend of truth and evasion was to characterise future legend. Todd did encounter words like blades but, as mouthpiece for the family, never mentions this, any more than Jane Austen’s family saw fit to mention her sarcasms. Nineteenth-century families project an image of an authoress as retiring lady whose gift shades into an uneventful life. Nothing could be said of sickness, love, adultery or the rising fire of the feud.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“In her lifetime, Emily Dickinson had been called ‘the myth’; when she died, Todd saw her disappear more deeply into her ‘mystery’. Higginson introduced her to the public as a nunnish recluse who never thought of publication. He characterised her as ‘whimsical’, ‘wayward’, ‘uneven’ and ‘exasperating’. Actually, the blueprint for this character goes back to the poet herself:”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Lavinia resented the way Todd underplayed Lavinia’s role in favour of her own. Money was not the main issue, nor even the prestige of association with strangely brilliant letters unlike any other. The crux was Mabel Todd’s advance, a step further on to Dickinson territory: her first step had won Susan; her second step had won Ned; her third, Austin, with Lavinia’s assent; a fourth step had failed to win over the poet herself, but Emily’s death had opened the way for a takeover of her papers.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

“Lavinia insisted that Todd’s preface should include a statement that Emily Dickinson’s sister had collected the letters. Todd, unaccustomed to submit on demand, persuaded Roberts Brothers to reprint the letters with a different version of that sentence. It was to say that Emily Dickinson’s sister had asked Mabel Loomis Todd to collect her letters, implying Todd alone had done the job.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds