The commonly told story of poet Emily Dickinson, who published ten poems in her lifetime, but left behind 1,789, is that of a pathetic recluse, disappointed in love, who shrank from publication.

But a new biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds (Virago, £20), by Oxford author Lyndall Gordon, portrays the poet as a volcanic character whose strange life was dominated by epilepsy, a disease which prevented her from marrying.

Marriage and motherhood were impossible for an epileptic, and Dickinson, argues her biographer, became a recluse because her fits could come on at any time. Gordon also sifts through the poems to find more evidence of the poet’s epilepsy.

Dickinson’s legacy was dominated by her brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, who edited her poems and made her famous, but the biography presents a different picture from the one handed down to posterity.

Todd was at the centre of the family feud, having started an affair with the poet’s brother Austin. The biographer suggests that the poet shared her sister-in-law’s dislike of Mabel. After Dickinson’s death, both women fought to publish her poems, and the feud was continued by her heirs.

Lyndall Gordon will talk at the Oxford Literary Festival at noon on Sunday, when one of her former Oxford students, the actress Emily Woof, will read Emily Dickinson’s poems.

See www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com, box office 0870 343 1001.