"Forever vanquished is the pallid icon of Emily Dickinson as the reclusive virgin saint of Amherst.... 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. Literary bloodhound and superbly eloquent chronicler Gordon follows every twist and kink of the ensuing legal skirmishes, especially the poignant battle between Mabel's daughter and Emily's niece, in a Shakespearean tale of a house divided. A jolting and utterly intriguing watershed achievement."—Booklist (starred review)