Emily Dickinson in Love

Price: $25.00  

Subtitle: The Case for Otis Lord
Written by John Evangelist Walsh
Subject: Literary Studies, Women's Studies
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5275-0
Pages: 216 pages
Publication Date: May 2012

Description:

Proud of my broken heart
Since thou didst break it,
Proud of the pain I
Did not feel till thee . . .

These words were written by Emily Dickinson to a married man. Who was he?

For a century or more the identity of Emily Dickinson's mysterious "Master" has been eagerly sought, especially since three letters from her to him were found and published in 1955. In Emily Dickinson in Love, John Evangelist Walsh provides the first book-length treatment of this fascinating subject, offering a solution based wholly on documented facts and the poet's own writings. Crafting the affair as a love story of rare appeal, and writing with exquisite attention to detail, in Part I Walsh reveals and meticulously proves the Master to be Otis Lord, a friend of the poet's father and a man of some reputation in law and politics. Part II portrays the full dimensions of their thirty-year romance, most of it clandestine, including a series of secret meetings in Boston.

After uncovering and confirming the Master's identity, Walsh fits that information into known events of Emily's life to make sense of facts long known but little understood—Emily's decision to dress always in white, for instance, or her extreme withdrawal from a normal existence when she had previously been an active, outgoing friend to many men and women.

In a lengthy section of Notes and Sources, Walsh presents his proofs in abundant detail, demonstrating that the evidence favors one man so irresistibly that there is left no room for doubt. Each reader will decide if he has truly succeeded in making the case for Otis Lord.

JOHN EVANGELIST WALSH is the author of numerous books of biography and history, including biographies of Emily Dickinson, John Keats, and Robert Frost as well as two well-received works on Abraham Lincoln. He has three times been a finalist for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, winning once for Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. His book, The Shadows Rise: Abraham Lincoln and the Ann Rutledge Legend, was a finalist for the prestigious Gettysburg Prize.