Emily's House
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4.1 • 27 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
She was Emily Dickinson’s maid, her confidante, her betrayer… and the savior of her legacy.
An evocative new novel about Emily Dickinson's longtime maid, Irish immigrant Margaret Maher, whose bond with the poet ensured Dickinson's work would live on, from the USA Today bestselling author of Flight of the Sparrow, Amy Belding Brown.
Massachusetts, 1869. Margaret Maher has never been one to settle down. At twenty-seven, she's never met a man who has tempted her enough to relinquish her independence to a matrimonial fate, and she hasn't stayed in one place for long since her family fled the potato famine a decade ago.
When Maggie accepts a temporary position at the illustrious Dickinson family home in Amherst, it's only to save money for her upcoming trip West to join her brothers in California. Maggie never imagines she will form a life-altering friendship with the eccentric, brilliant Miss Emily or that she'll stay at the Homestead for the next thirty years.
In this richly drawn novel, Amy Belding Brown explores what it is to be an outsider looking in, and she sheds light on one of Dickinson's closest confidantes—perhaps the person who knew the mysterious poet best—whose quiet act changed history and continues to influence literature to this very day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brown (Flight of the Sparrow) crafts an enjoyable story out of what is known about Margaret Maher, the Irish maid who preserved Emily Dickinson's poems for posterity. Maher becomes a servant in the Amherst, Mass., household of affluent Edward Dickinson in February 1869. Since she plans to soon join her brothers in California, she's untroubled by his daughter Emily's reclusiveness and eccentricities. Edward soon informs Margaret she has grown essential to his family, and hints that if she leaves, he will have her brother-in-law fired from his railroad job. Afraid to put her family at risk, Margaret surrenders, and by the time Edward dies in 1874, Margaret feels too rooted in the family's life to leave. Over the course of her 30 years with the Dickinsons, Margaret's bond with Emily steadily deepens: she comes to revere the poet's imagination and literary gifts, while Emily depends on Margaret's loyalty and forthrightness. When Emily, distraught over her lack of literary success, considers destroying her poems, she gives them to Margaret on condition that she burn them after Emily's death. At once an outsider and a woman intimately immersed in the Dickinson household, Margaret paints a shrewd picture of the family's personalities, customs, and complexities. Brown once again shows a gift for shedding light on historical women.
