there are many versions of Emily Dickinson to choose from

there are many versions of Emily Dickinson to choose from As I’ve since learned, she’s a hero, or an object of fascination, to many people, which is why she periodically takes a star turn in culture, as she is doing now. She’s the subject of two books, a novel titled “The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson,” by Jerome Charyn, and a new biography by Lyndall Gordon, called “Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds,” due out next month. And through June 13 the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx has an elaborate exhibition devoted to her, with a re-creation of her Homestead garden, a selection of handwritten manuscripts and a marathon reading of her poems.

Unsurprisingly, after decades of close attention, there are many versions of Emily Dickinson to choose from.

Where scholars once focused on her isolation, they’re now seeing her life as clamorous with company. (Her written correspondence extended to upward of a hundred people.) And they’re scrutinizing her connections to her time: to the Civil War, to Victorian literature, to the provincial class system she was born into.

Feminist theory and queer studies have contributed to reshaping her personality profile. A shy, passive, recessive figure has been transformed into an active, mettlesome, gender-challenging presence, a poet in control of her art and environment, and fully conscious of the mechanics of personal myth.

True, the distance between fact and fiction remains hazy, with the perky Belle of Amherst on one end of the spectrum and an agoraphobic basket case on the other. The portrait of Dickinson as a sexually precocious schoolgirl in the picaresque Charyn novel is almost total fantasy with a few grains of truth. The Gordon account of the Homestead as a hornet’s nest of jealousies and resentments is accurate as to facts but operatic in its effects.

The Dickinson I first knew and grew up with also came from a pair of books. My introduction was a thin, square volume called “Famous American Poets” by Laura Benét. Published in 1950, it consisted of brief, chronologically ordered, determinedly upbeat biographies of popular writers from Clement Clarke Moore to Carl Sandburg hydraulic cylinderwith Dickinson right in the middle. And a very 1950s Dickinson this was, starting with the portrait used as an illustration.