Emily & Herman: A Literary Romance

By: John J. Healey

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Synopsis: “A genuinely insightful” historical novel uniting literary lions Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville in intrigue and forbidden romance (Booklist). It’s the summer of 1851. Herman Melville is finishing Moby Dick on his family farm in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, surrounded by his mother, sisters, and pregnant wife. It’s a calm and productive season until Herman’s neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, lures him to Amherst. There they meet chaste, twenty-year-old Emily Dickinson and her brother, Austin. On a whim, the two distinguished authors invite the Dickinson siblings to accompany them on a trip to Boston and New York. It’s here that they cross paths with journalist Walt Whitman and runaway slave, William Johnson. And it’s here that Emily and Herman—bold maiden and married man—both flushed with the excitement of new adventures, fall uncontrollably in love. Beautifully capturing the heady longings of puritan life, moral quandaries, philosophical quests, and social change of mid-nineteenth century America, Emily & Herman is a love story for all time.