This Brief Tragedy

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…