An extraordinary novel! Robert McDowell's book is deeply intelligent, devoted, poetic and timeless, a fantasy so real you can taste it. Woven from meticulous research of the mind and heart, this meeting of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf is a gem. McDowell knows these women, two brilliant artists, each "irreverent, a pistol and painfully shy."
--Barbara Dana, author of A Voice of Her Own: Becoming Emily Dickinson and Young Joan
"What a treat to encounter Dickinson and Woolf forging a sisterhood out of poetry, prose, and endless curiosity about the people and places around them. Robert McDowell's Emily & Virginia is a rollicking journey through time and space, exploring literature, art, friendship, and love in smart, sparkling writing."
--Kristin Czarnecki
Professor of English
Georgetown College, Georgetown, KY
Past President International Virginia Woolf Society
"In drafting Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf as Lily's guardians and embassies from the world of the dead you make palpable--and charmingly funny, awkward, eccentric--the magical ways in which poetry, fiction, words, may really be the best recourse we have for facing the agonies of loss, guilt, loneliness, and death. "Like company that makes pleasure or pain more bearable by increasing its surface," Virginia explains, "art transforms grief and loss into something bearable, even beautiful." Your novel insists on the importance of both art and company. The relationship between Emily and Virginia is one of the best things in this book...So this novel knows that there is more than one way to be a woman artist--and Lily Ramsay promises another mode: one, as her name suggests, in which painting and marriage/motherhood need not be at odds. Your villain clowns are also wonderful...I appreciate too the book's love story--or many love stories--and its injunction in love, as in living more generally, and in making art, of careful observation and an open mind."
--Karen Sánchez-Eppler (she, her)
L. Stanton Williams '41 Professor of American Studies and English
Chair of American Studies, Amherst College
