A new movie remembers the real Emily Dickinson — passionate, ambitious, and queer

The great American poet Emily Dickinson is, in the popular imagination, a recluse, a shut-in, a woman scribbling alone in her room for her own pleasure, her work only really discovered after her death in 1886. She’s thought to have been longing for some man, called “The Master” in notes she wrote, the identity of whom has preoccupied scholars for years. But she was a lonely spinster her whole life.

Or was she? Scholarship lately has indicated that Dickinson had a lifelong love affair with her childhood friend Susan Gilbert, who later became her sister-in-law after she married Emily’s brother Austin Dickinson. They lived next door to each other throughout their adult lives. But, it seems, Austin’s mistress Mabel Loomis Todd — who was Emily’s first posthumous editor — literally erased references to Susan from Emily’s letters and worked to paint Susan and Emily’s relationship as frosty. Now scholars dispute that narrative entirely.

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Which gave writer and director Madeleine Olnek the ripe opportunity to make a hilarious and moving film about Emily, Susan, Mabel, Austin, and the whole semi-farcical, semi-tragic situation. Molly Shannon plays Emily Dickinson as a vivacious, brilliant woman who passionately desired not just love but also success — another blow to the common narrative. It’s a bracing, often funny reclamation of a famous woman’s life as her own; one that, in the end, packs a true gut punch.

I spoke with Olnek by phone the day before the film’s theatrical release. We talked about why people are rocked by the retelling of Emily’s story, why she didn’t have her actors read much before they began shooting, and how Emily was far ahead of her time. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Alissa Wilkinson

So why did you want to tell this story, in this way?

Madeleine Olnek

I first came across an article in the New York Times in 1998, about how advancements in science allow us to understand new things about historical figures. One of the stories was about using spectrographic technologies to look at the erasures in Emily Dickinson’s papers. Martha Nell Smith, a Dickinson expert and scholar, talked about the work she was doing, and she’s the person our movie’s dedicated to. She also served as the historical consultant on the movie.

What was interesting about that article was that it talks about her papers, and how the erasures were all around the name Susan. But then there was a letter that wasn’t erased — and it was the most passionate, love-struck letter you’ve ever read, from Emily to Susan.

I was like, Oh, my God! That letter wasn’t erased? There were all these letters that weren’t ... defiled — I don’t know how else to say it. They were published, a big chunk of them, in 1999. There were so many letters from Emily to Susan that when Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart put together [their collection] Open Me Carefully, their publisher wouldn’t let them include all the letters or the book would have been too long.

I was really stunned that there was this key aspect of Emily Dickinson that I had never heard about. And that the mistress of Emily Dickinson’s brother [Austin, husband of Susan] was the one who probably did the erasures, and she was the one who put together Emily Dickinson’s first books. It was such a soap opera, so opposite of everything I had ever heard [about Dickinson’s life], that I was floored. I was really floored.

I started to read Dickinson’s biography, and in the appendix was the book that Emily Dickinson’s brother’s mistress tried to write. She tried to write this tell-all called Scurrilous but True, and it was so funny. It was like a tabloid magazine. You just wouldn’t think of people in the 1800s talking like that about other people. I found myself laughing as I read it.

So much of this story has been available for so long, and yet it hadn’t been told. That was very, very interesting to me.

Alissa Wilkinson

The whole thing rewrites our image of Emily. Did it rewrite yours?

Madeleine Olnek

Oh, yeah. The notion I had before I read that New York Times article was that she was a kind of creepy recluse — the same notion that everyone had, the one we were taught to believe.

So my idea of her has completely changed. That image was really almost the image of an insane woman: someone who writes almost 2,000 poems but hides them in her room and doesn’t want to be published. So the most interesting part to me — and it’s also a reaction I get to the film, which I love — is how surprised people are by Emily Dickinson’s poetry. They thought it was one thing. Then they see the movie and they understand it’s something else.

Alissa Wilkinson

What do people discover about her poetry?

Madeleine Olnek

I feel like it allows you to step inside a psychological space in a way that’s extremely modern. There were things that she wrote about before psychology had even defined them.

Alissa Wilkinson

Like what?

Madeleine Olnek

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – ... In this poem she talks about the experience people have when they’re dying, like it’s freezing to death. She talks about pain as an element of blank — like that’s how your head feels, emotionally, when you’re in a lot of pain, you almost feel a blankness. Mabel didn’t understand, and titled that poem “The Mystery of Pain,” as if the “blank” was “fill in the blank,” as opposed to blank being the state that you felt and inhabited. The way that grief surrounds you, the way that, just like water or walking through a lake, it slows you down. It feels like wading when you’re in a state of grief.

These were really stunning poems, and when people see the movie and say now they want to read Emily Dickinson, that’s just such a great outcome.

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Alissa Wilkinson

Yeah, I mean, one interesting thing I’ve always thought about Emily Dickinson is that there’s a lot of projection that goes on when people think of her. Do you know Billy Collins’s poem about undressing Emily Dickinson and how all teenage boys fall in love with Emily Dickinson?

Madeleine Olnek

That’s funny!

Alissa Wilkinson

It is. Which is also true of your film! We get the picture of a very vibrant, funny woman.

Madeleine Olnek

You said a word that was very interesting — that people were “projecting” onto her. The popular image of her was specifically created for that purpose. She was made into a cipher. She was made out to not be a flesh-and-blood woman.

It was still surprising to me to read that Emily Dickinson had three pictures of women writers on her wall. She was a writer who saw herself in the lineage of women writers. She’s often been portrayed as an accidental craftsperson. There’s the notion that she had a broken heart, that she was writing for some man, that she felt so much that she poured this stuff out. It wasn’t because she had aspirations to the writer’s craft, poetry, that she worked at.

I think the true Emily Dickinson was very much a rebel. She led her life on her own terms. She refused to go to church. She only saw the people she wanted to, which is very different from being afraid to leave your room. She wasn’t a recluse; she was socially selective, and she only saw the people she wanted to. Her family was the most prominent family in town, so that was extremely scandalous of her.

Alissa Wilkinson

Oddly, it seems like Hollywood is always trying to dream up a character like her, and they don’t know how, and end up with so-called “strong female characters” who always seem to have to, like, drink whiskey and ride motorcycles. And there Emily Dickinson is, right there.

Madeleine Olnek

Right, right, exactly.

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Alissa Wilkinson

You cast Molly Shannon in the role of Emily. What was that decision process like? Were you always intending for this to be a comedy?

Madeleine Olnek

Well, I had done a play version in 1999. That one was even more of a comedy the whole way through, which this movie intentionally isn’t. The film is equal parts serious and comedic, on purpose. Emily’s writing has that mix.

I did know I always wanted Molly for Emily Dickinson because she’s one of a kind, and such a unique person, that people would understand who Emily Dickinson was just from the fact of her playing her.

Alissa Wilkinson

And did you have her read anything other than Emily’s poetry to get inside her character?

Madeleine Olnek

Well, the difficulty of asking the actors to do research is that if they were researching on their own, they would have been coming across things that were all wrong. Like things — like that she had her papers burned on her death, and she talked to people through walls, and all that stuff that’s out there.

So I asked for people not to research the roles other than reading the poet’s own words.

The president of the Emily Dickinson International Society, who saw the film last summer and loved it, said to me, “You know, one thing that people don’t understand is that when Emily Dickinson scholarship first began, people didn’t know that Mabel was Austin’s mistress, and that Mabel had a beef with Susan.” They didn’t understand that she had this vested interest in painting Susan as this horrible person who was terrible to Emily. That’s what’s in the definitive biography: that Emily and Susan had a falling-out, and they weren’t friends basically for their whole adult life, and didn’t even see each other.

Alissa Wilkinson

So what has the response to the film been, particularly from the scholarly community? I feel like some people’s worlds probably have been shaken.

Madeleine Olnek

I know what you’re talking about. But I can tell you that anyone who is a serious scholar of Dickinson has read Emily Dickinson’s letters — not only her letters to Susan, but the surviving material on Kate [Scott Turner], and knows about not just Emily and Susan but Emily and Kate. After Kate’s brief affair with Emily ended, she years later ended up living in Europe as openly gay. And that daguerreotype surfaced a couple years ago, of Emily Dickinson with her arm around Kate. We reference that in the party scene in the movie. But their relationship is a lot harder to deny now. Like, there’s pictures. It’s a lot harder.

This was a hard story to uncover, because obviously women’s history is deeply buried. History between women is even more deeply buried. And in a situation of women in love with each other, the people themselves are obviously hiding it because they had to. It wasn’t a choice, you know. This was all before identity politics, before the word lesbian even existed. So it is very complicated.

It was even more complicated for Susan than it was for Emily. I know that she hid stuff. I know that once she married Austin and she had three children by him — that becomes a real relationship. That’s not a beard. That has a reality to it.

Greenwich Entertainment

But to answer your question, I do feel like the saddest part of people being rocked by the film is, I think, that Emily Dickinson has been, in a way, the patron saint of the lonely and unrecognized. For some women, who may have idolized that idea of her, who themselves are themselves lonely and unrecognized — to have that twisted. To be like, oh, my God, this woman actually did want recognition. She was trying to be published.

Part of the important historical corrective is it’s as important to understand that she had a full life with loving relationships as it is to understand that she was not content to hide her work away. She was sending it out and trying to get recognized as a writer. Of course she was! Why else would someone spend — it’s so hard to write! Why would you do that if you didn’t want to get published?

In a way, she’s the patron saint, a role model. She’s been held up as a fake role model: Women, just bide your time, don’t ask for anything, and you can die and be recognized after death, just like Emily Dickinson. And that’s all been just a load of bunk.

That makes it painful for some people.

Alissa Wilkinson

But also inspiring, right?

Madeleine Olnek

Yeah, exactly. But not inspiring if you’ve already lived your whole life the other way. Then it’s painful.

Alissa Wilkinson

Yeah. I think one of the joys of the way the film mixes comedy and melancholy is that Emily feels like an actual, real person.

Madeleine Olnek

That is our intention. The thing is, she was a real person. It’s important that people know that.

Wild Nights With Emily is now playing in select theaters around the US. You can find tickets here.

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