“... time). In her rollicking Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds (2010), Lyndall Gordon suggests that Emily would not have taken well to being excluded from areas of her own house for hours at a time while her brother and his mistress did God knows what behind closed doors. Lavinia, on the other hand, quickly became an ...”

“... with which the novelist treats the raw material that life offers him. Tóibín’s admiration for Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life of Henry James (1998), a study of James’s relationships with Temple and Woolson, valuably left its mark on The Master. Gordon presents James, as Tóibín says, ‘as a selfish and ...”