A New Emily?

From the department of unexpected casting, Molly Shannon plays poet Emily Dickinson in the new movie Wild Nights With Emily. At Bustle, Trish Bendix wonders whether the film, directed by Madeleine Olnek achieves its goal: casting a new light on the life of a poet far more transgressive than literary scholars initially revealed. Bendix writes that "scholars and technology have discovered something quite interesting in the last few decades, and that is [Mabel Loomis] Todd's heavy hand, specifically when it came to removing all references to Dickinson's sister-and-law and lover, per Slate, Susan Huntington Dickson, from poems and correspondence. This is all depicted in a new film from Madeleine Olnek, starring Molly Shannon as the oft-referred to reclusive spinster, but how accurate is Wild Nights With Emily?" From there:

Olnek, who wrote and directed the historically-based comedy, out April 12, was inspired by a New York Times article published in 1998, according to Deadline. Phillip Weiss's "Beethoven's Hair Tells All!" detailed how new scientific advances gave researchers the ability to review manuscripts such as Dickinson's, and see where and how they were censored. In Dickinson's case, it appeared Loomis removed references to her same-sex romance with Susan.

“I read this article and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ Her whole life was basically the total opposite of everything you’d ever heard, and I couldn’t even believe it,” Olnek told Deadline.

Historians have long debated Dickinson's perceived homosexuality. Martha Nell Smith, an English professor at the University of Maryland, was one of the first to touch upon Dickinson's more-than-friendly relationship with Susan in her book Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. The New York Times story that inspired Olnek asserts that Smith and her co-editor Ellen Louise Hart found evidence of the highly-private relationship that "several generations of scholars ... were bent on ignoring, slighting or censoring." Smith was among those using infrared technology to prove Loomis's literal erasure of the two women's love as evinced in recovered handwritten letters and poems dedicated to Susan. During the editing and publishing process, the New York Times says, "someone crossed out portions of Emily's work with pen and ink — or sometimes lifted entire words off the linen page with a sharp blade." Smith believes it was Todd, "the first to shepherd a volume of Emily's poems into print."

Read more at Bustle.