Wild nights for Emily, randy afternoons for Austin

Austin Dickinson

Over at Slate, Adam Kirsch digs into the "new" secrets about the Dickinsons revealed in Lives Like Loaded Guns:

At 2:30 in the afternoon, the poet's brother, Austin—a married father of three, a pillar of Amherst society, and the treasurer of Amherst College—would leave his house next door, ostensibly to pay a call on Emily and his other sister, Lavinia. In fact, he came to meet Mabel Loomis Todd, the seductive young wife of the Amherst College astronomer David Todd, and have sex with her on Emily Dickinson's dining room couch . . .