So I was confused and completely intrigued by Olnek’s Wild Nights: Who was this carefree, queer Emily? It turns out, as Olnek tells me, she’d been “hiding in plain sight” this whole time.

Even as recently as three years ago, Terence Davies’s movie A Quiet Passion portrayed Dickinson this way: a lonely woman wracked with vulnerability, in love with a married reverend and, as she grew older, profoundly unable to confront the outside world. I’d been taught that she was antisocial, afraid of being published, and that she obsessed over mysterious men but never married or found love. The story kicks off just as Emily and Susan’s romance does: The two fall in love as schoolgirls performing a play they pretend to be having chaste sleepovers while they’re peeling off one another’s petticoats when Susan marries Emily’s brother, she says she’s doing it so that they can live next door to one another for their entire lives as an adult, a disheveled, grinning Emily races across the lawn at dawn after a hot night at Susan’s.Īs a queer woman and an English major who read Emily Dickinson in several classes, I’d only heard light rumblings about her sexuality - and never anything about her being remotely fun. It’s one of many such scenes in the funny, sexy, bold new film from writer-director Madeleine Olnek. “I want to stay here, on the coats,” says Emily. “We should go downstairs,” she says with a trace of sadness.

After a few minutes of kissing, interspersed with joyful gossip about the guests below, Susan pauses. Giggling mischievously, the two lock themselves in a bedroom above the festivities, fall onto a pile of coats, and begin passionately making out. About midway through Wild Nights With Emily, Molly Shannon, playing the iconic American poet Emily Dickinson, sneaks away from a party to meet with her brother’s wife, Susan Dickinson.

Emily dickinson open me carefully