Book Review: Readings

The Sister: A Novel of Emily Dickinson

by Paola Kaufmann

The Rookery Press, 280 pp., $24.95

"What if your sister were destined to become one of the greatest poets of all time?" inquires the sleek black-and-white book jacket of The Sister, based on the life of mythologized 19th century poet Emily Dickinson and fictionally narrated by her younger sister, Lavinia Dickinson. A former biologist, Paola Kaufmann has successfully blended an engaging, delicately scripted story with thorough research gleaned from actual letters and journal entries, compilations of poems, and critical essays. She has essentially tried to re-create the personalities and dialogue of the story's true-life characters.

For those who only know Emily Dickinson's work and little about her background – aside from the same-old, same-old descriptions of the New England native as a kooky, neurotic recluse always dressed in white – The Sister offers insight into the poet's character and life, a life largely empty of nonfamilial human contact and worldly experience but filled with introspection, idiosyncrasies, and red hair. The Sister reads as Lavinia's lifelong diary, detailing the family's history and the tortuous journey Lavinia undertook to publish Emily's poems following her death. And thus the irony is revealed in the pages beneath the book jacket, evidently a symbol of Emily's proclivity toward white and Lavinia's toward black. Emily never desired fame, yet it was Lavinia, who did wish to be famous but considered herself banal and untalented, who is responsible for Emily's literary immortality. She fought publishers who deemed Emily's poetry too eldritch and inaccessible, not as a tribute to her sister, but because she felt Emily's work belonged to the world.

Emily died in 1886, at the age of 55, years before the rest of the world came to know her as a lovesick genius, and Kaufmann died of cancer in 2006, at the age of 37, a year before The Sister, originally published in Spanish in 2003 as La Hermana, was to grace American bookstores, along with her last novel, The Lake, released in October. Unfortunately, Kaufmann will not write again, but her determination to tell the truth but tell it slant lives on in her work.