Emily Dickinson was an amusing ghoul, in the august tradition of American goth girls, which begins with Poe’s heroines, whose more recent iterations include Wednesday Addams and Rob Reger’s cartoon character Emily the Strange.

This, the real Emily Dickinson, has so far eluded view, because the real Emily Dickinson 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 a respectable woman living in the puritanic little town of Amherst Massachusetts in the mid nineteenth century. For safety’s sake, she wrote in code.