From an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, a wonderfully smooth, sinuous, enigmatic, and sexy tale of two love affairs ("Providence Journal") set in Amherst and illuminated by the presence of Emily Dickinson.
Alice Dickinson, a young advertising executive in London, decides to take time off work to research her idea for a screenplay: the true story of the scandalous, adulterous love affair between Emily Dickinson s married brother, Austin, and a young, Amherst College faculty wife named Mabel Loomis Todd. Austin, twenty-four years Mabel s senior and the college treasurer, lived next door to his reclusive sister, who allowed her home to be used for Austin and Mabel s trysts.
Alice travels to Amherst, staying in the house of Nick Crocker, a married English academic in his fifties. As Alice researches Austin and Mabel s story and Emily s role in their affair, she embarks on her own affair with Nick, an affair that, of course, they both know echoes the one that she s writing about.
Using the poems of Emily Dickinson throughout, historically accurate and meticulously recreated from their voluminous letters and diaries, William Nicholson deftly weaves Mabel s story with Alice s, shedding light on the timeless longing, lust, and loneliness of love ("People"). "Amherst" is a provocative and remarkable novel: The poetry and history go down easy, the lovers fall hard, and the tragic, treacherous terrain of romantic entanglement is well explored ("Elle")."