News & Events A Quiet Passion, an Active Homestead

As moviegoers attend a new film portraying the life of Emily Dickinson, one of its stars —her home in Amherst—is getting renewed attention and care.

British filmmaker Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion, which stars Cynthia Nixon as the poet (and Emma Bell as the teenaged Dickinson), opened last month.

Mike Kelly, head of the College’s archives and special collections, gets a thank-you in the film’s credits, as does Emily Dickinson Museum Director Jane Wald.

Much of the film was shot in Belgium in spring 2015 in a picture-perfect replica of the Dickinson home’s interior. That summer, filmmakers took exterior shots in Amherst, including on the grounds of the museum, where the poet was born, spent her adult life, wrote nearly 1,800 poems and died, all in an ever-increasing state of seclusion.

Watching the movie, frequent visitors to the museum will find details about Dickinson’s home and life that are spot-on, and others that are more in keeping with a filmmaker’s right to re-interpret.

One detail that might escape even a close viewing of the film is the omission of the home’s conservatory, where the poet cultivated plants including oleander, primrose, dianthus, fuchsia and lilies.

The reason for that omission is simple: the conservatory was torn down a century ago. Now, however, though the film crews are long gone, the conservatory will soon be back. 

The conservatory began as a 17-by-6-foot room added to the home during an 1855 renovation that marked the family’s return to the house after financial difficulties had forced them to move out for 15 years.

Dickinson called it “the little garden within,” where she cared for and cultivated plants that wouldn’t have survived New England winters.

The poet kept a writing stand at a living room window that looked out on the conservatory.

“My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles,” she wrote in 1866.

Dismantled by new owners in 1916, the conservatory is returning this month, when the museum will also reopen a bricked-up passage between the library and the conservatory, reinstating this part of the floor plan as it was when the poet was an adult.

“I think it'll be a terrific addition to how we get to interpret Emily Dickinson's life,” Wald said.

Crews are shooting for a May 12 completion date, and the museum has scheduled a May 21 opening reception for the project’s donors.

In April, even as the film was premiering, the Homestead was getting more attention for a new program in which writers are able to spend an hour or two undisturbed in the poet’s bedroom.

This unusual program, offered since last fall, was recently the subject of first-person accounts by New York Times reporter Sarah Lyall and Jezebel’s Anya Jaremko-Greenwold. In fall 2016, the Greenfield Recorder wrote about poet Joshua Michael Stewart’s stay in the Dickinson bedroom.

“A calm came over me, and I was overtaken by a sharp distilled focus that expressed itself, bizarrely, in a compulsion to write,” Lyall wrote in the Times. “I did something I hadn’t done since elementary school, and never of my own accord: I began to compose a poem.”

Jaremko-Greenwold’s article pondered the view from that second-story window. “I considered what Dickinson would think of such things,” she wrote.  “What of climate change? Of Twitter? Of Donald Trump?”

Emily Dickinson’s bedroom now averages about one guest per week. “We're certainly not the first, but I think the idea of occupying the writing space of someone who was a fairly private person may set it apart,” Wald said.

There are some ground rules. Laptops are welcome; pens are not. No more than two people are allowed at a time, and the bedroom door has to remain open at all times. Stays are limited to two hours.

Still, if you can’t manage to commune with Dickinson’s spirit in her home, there’s always the movie. “A Quiet Passion” is currently playing in select cities throughout the US. It is screening at the Amherst Cinema through May 11.