The cruel irony of an Emily Dickinson biopic: “Fame is a bee./It has a song—/It has a sting—/Ah, too, it has a wing”

In September, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Cynthia Nixon was slated to play Emily Dickinson in Terence Davies’ biopic “A Quiet Passion,” and I haven’t been this angry over a literary figure since Alan Gribben announced his intentions of altering the language in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Just as that moment was a slap in the face to Twain’s social commentary, this too seems to be a mockery of Dickinson’s life—a misunderstanding of the beloved reclusive poet who “rewrote both her male and her female predecessors by creating her own life as a gothic narrative,” as Susan M. Griffin so aptly puts it in The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature.