'A Quiet Passion' Dazzles Gradually
Filmmaker Terence Davies has found his ideal subject with this Emily Dickinson biopic, and a fiery performance by Cynthia Nixon challenges notions of the poet as a dour recluse.
"A sheltered life can be daring too," the Southern writer Eudora Welty wrote in her 1984 memoir, One Writer's Beginnings. Writing about what and whom she saw around her, Welty enjoyed robust literary fame without ever marrying or moving out of her parents' house in Jackson, Mississippi.
A century earlier, Emily Dickinson also remained single and stayed home, where she wrote some 1800 poems that — stranded between hope and despair of getting published — she stitched together into booklets. A few of her formally precocious modernist verses made it into the local Massachusetts press, but
