This Brief Tragedy

the long version

Dear cousins, Called back. Emily. Why did Emily Dickinson write this cryptic note to her spinster cousins just before she died? In this arresting, even startling re-evaluation of the poet's final years -- and her posthumous career -- John Evangelist Walsh examines the effect of several tragedies that struck Dickinson in the last four years of her life: the illicit love affair between her brother, Austin, and a young married woman, Mabel Todd; the deaths of her nephew Gilbert and her adored Judge Otis Lord (who may have been the "Master" of her middle years); and the Bright's disease that made her an invalid. The combination of these afflictions, Walsh demonstrates, may have led Emily to take her own life. - Jacket flap.