It Came From Amherst: the supernatural, mystical, lesbian, and fin de siècle poetry of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was an amusing ghoul, in the august tradition of American goth girls, which begins with Poe’s heroines, Ligeia, Morella and Annabelle Lee, and whose more recent iterations include Wednesday Addams and Rob Reger’s cartoon character Emily the Strange.
The real, the dark Emily Dickinson, has so far eluded view—in part because the she needed to. She was a horror writer, a lesbian, a mystic, and a fin-de-siècle decadent—none of which would have been acceptable in the mid-nineteenth-century puritanic little town of Amherst Massachusetts. For safety’s sake, she wrote in code, to which this volume provides the key.