Nuala O'Connor's intriguing American debut, Miss Emily, is about the poet Emily Dickinson. O'Connor skillfully imagines a fictional maid, 18-year-old Ada Concannon from Dublin, hired by the respected but odd Dickinson family as housekeeper and cook. Emily and Ada speak in alternating chapters, gently flowing back and forth, as this tender novel reveals their growing friendship.
Right from the start, Emily speaks of her desire for quiet and retreat, to be "free to pursue the things that please me." She revels in her imagination and what she can create with words. Into her isolated world enters the spunky Ada. Emily is twice her age, but the women immediately bond. O'Connor delves into Emily's being, trying to uncover what makes this spinster tick. Emily loves her family and is very fond of Susan, her brother Austin's wife. Miss Emily imagines how Dickinson's mind worked, how in her quiet world she was able to create the most wondrous poems, some of which she recites for Ada. And when the maid runs into trouble with men who help around the Dickinson home, she will require the kind of assistance that only Miss Emily can provide. "There is no better secret keeper than a Dickinson; we are able to close around our skeletons as snug as a shroud."
O'Connor takes readers deep inside the 19th-century Dickinson household. But she also has a bolder mission--to capture and explore the inner world of a secretive and mysterious genius. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher