The Story of Emily Dickinson's Master: "WILD NIGHTS! WILD NIGHTS!"

This biographical novel is based on the life of America's more iconic and widely read woman poet, Emily Dickinson of Amherst, Massachusetts who became known for her succinct and pointedly meaningful lyrical poetry the world over after her death and posthumous publicaton. The book is based on a carefully reserached non-fiction forward: "Lover of Science and Scientist in Dark Days of the Republic" which discloses at last who the mysterious "Master Figure" of Dickinson's love poems and letters was. It portrays the poet as the full blown womanly person she really was, the woman of her erotic poems such as her well known, "Wild Nights! Wild Nights!" It dispells the false mythology that has surrounded the iconic poet as a spinster and a recluse. Dickinson was actually quite different and far more lively in demeanor than the myths that have been instituted about her as a lonely, asocial woman. This novel by the widely published American Book Award winning author and accomplished poet and literary critic, Daniela Gioseff, was well reviewed by Dickinson scholars and the foreword upon which it was based was admired by poets Galway Kinnell, Pulitzer and National Book Award winning poet and thorough reader of Dckinson’s poetry and life; Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the USA, also a learned reader of Dickinson and her times; and Alice Quinn, Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, something of a Dickinson scholar in her own right. As Gioseffi says at the beginning of her forword: "Because of the connection to her creativity during its most emergent period, the identity of the mysterious “Master Figure” of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters, has been a matter of great speculation and pointed disagreement among Dickinson scholars for over a century. Connie Ann Kirk in her 2004 biography Emily Dickinson, Greenwood Press, wrote: “…a scholar or historian who could somehow prove ‘Master’s’ true identity would solve one of the greatest mysteries in American literature.” We know a good deal about the life of our other most singular icon of 19th Century American Poetry, Walt Whitman, but details of Dickinson’s personal life have become so mythologized that we can’t see as clearly the edifying connections between her biography and poetic output. One can contend, as the poet Susan Howe does in My Emily Dickinson ((See bib.) that this circumstance leaves many of her poems elliptical or impenetrable. Of course, the most famous of her works— those anthologized, recited, remembered, and taught— are not among such texts. The poet left behind about 1,800 poems, only eleven were formally published, and those anonymously, in her lifetime. The rest, many unfinished, were posthumously collected in her complete works....Many feel, and rightly so, that an artist’s biography need only be explored if it enlightens the art produced, and not for gossip’s sake or the pleasures of voyeurism. Yet, due to recent scholarship that has come to light about who the mysterious “Master Figure” of Dickinson’s poems and letters was, we can manage a whole new reading of this important poet’s work. Undoing the mythology surrounding Dickinson’s overblown seclusion, the trauma that brought her to it, along with the inspiration for her writing, the wearing of her notorious white dress, and reasons for little publication in her lifetime, renders a clearer reading and greater appreciation of her many posthumously published texts." The Book Review Editor of The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin wrote of the hardcopy version: “ “A page turning tale of a bitter sweet love affair (1857-1865)…Gioseffi, a compelling storyteller, cleverly incorporates Dickinson’s poems, capturing the intellectual, cultural, and political ideas and voices of the 19th century...The novel is alive with detail and heartfelt emotion...Gioseffi introduces a Dickinson most readers have not met before." (The novel is a slightly different than the 2010 hardcopy version.