There is some element of banality in any love affair that makes it difficult for the outsider to appreciate the full force of other people’s passions. Even the steamy, complicated adultery of Austin Dickinson, Emily Dickinson’s beloved brother, and Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of a professor of anatomy at Amherst College, is more interesting to read about in Polly Longsworth’s lengthy introduction to Austin and Mabel than in the selection of the love letters the couple wrote during their thirteen-year affair. It is from the clandestine correspondence (a thousand or more letters and notes) as well as relevant passages from private diaries and journals that Longsworth has constructed this absorbing chronicle of one of the more revealing cases of late Victorian sexual behavior.

The affair began in 1882. Mabel Todd was twenty-five, new to Amherst, a vivacious hostess and accomplished painter, writer, and singer; Austin Dickinson was fifty-three, a married man, a respected lawyer, a trustee of the college, and a leading citizen in the community. Passion moved cautiously in those days; it was not until more than a year later, on December 13, 1883, that Austin and Mabel found sexual fulfillment behind the closed doors of the dining room in the Dickinson family home where Austin’s unmarried sisters, Emily and Lavinia, lived. The couple commemorated the event with two dated slips of paper on which they braided their first names together in a code word: AMUASBTEILN. Mabel slipped hers between the pages of her diary;