Though in her lifetime only ten of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published, her death revealed 1,789 poems, many of them in hand-sewn booklets, secreted in a locked chest. She is now regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time, but she has come down to us as a woman disappointed in love, an odd and pathetic woman who dressed in white and shut herself away.

Lyndall Gordon sees instead her volcanic character - 'a soul at White Heat' - a mystic and lover whose family harboured a hothouse drama of sex, scandal and devastating betrayal.

Emily Dickinson was a woman beyond her time who found love, spiritual quickening and immortality all on her own terms: she wrote 'My Life had Stood - a Loaded Gun'.

Lyndall has written a brilliant and powerful book that rewrites the legend of this great poet and draws us back into her explosive genius.

Born and raised in Cape Town, Lyndall received her doctorate from Columbia University and is a fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford.  She is the author of the prizewinning biographies Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life and Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life.