Review: 'Emily's House,' by Amy Belding Brown

By Amy Belding Brown. (Berkley, 384 pages, $17.)

At times while reading "Emily's House" I felt like I was watching an episode of "Dickinson," the Apple TV Plus series that brings the life of 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson to vivid color (and hip modernization). The passing of a rattling carriage when death is mentioned, the racy liaisons in the dining room, the lilting accent of the Irish maid — both novel and TV show are about as far away from old-fashioned and stodgy as you can get.

The framework of Amy Belding Brown's historical novel is based in fact; the plot is mostly made up, but it rings true as Brown tells the story through the eyes and voice of the maid, Margaret Maher. Margaret worked in the Dickinson household for 30 years and became a confidante of Emily Dickinson, promising that she would destroy Emily's poems after the poet's death — which she did not do.

The novel fleshes out who Margaret was, invents a love interest for her (a slightly clichéd young Irish Fenian named Patrick), gives her a family and a full life outside of the Dickinson household, and puts us inside Margaret's head when she makes the fateful decision to preserve Emily's work.

In Brown's deft hands, Emily comes to life as a sensuous, mischievous, entitled young woman, coddled by family and perhaps afflicted by agoraphobia but nonetheless exhibiting a robust love of life (as well as a robust love life). Her murky relationship with her sister-in-law, Sue — perhaps romantic, perhaps merely a close friendship — remains murky here, and her late-in-life romance with Judge Otis Lord is downright bawdy.

The voice, the setting, the details of the house all feel authentic, which means a reader can just sink into the story, observing the eccentric Dickinson family through the eyes of an outsider right there in the kitchen.