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William Luce describes in the Preface to his play, The Belle of Amherst,1 how:
it was my hope to depict the humanity and reasonableness of Emily Dickinson's life. … The strange faces of genius are enigmatic to the structured mind, probing for final answers. Causation seems as elusive as “melody or witchcraft” [Letter 261]. …2
The essential Emily of my play is secretly saying to the audience, “Pardon my sanity.” [L185] Pardon my jubilation in
, 1978. The play itself has inevitably become the object of critical attention: see, for example, Maravene Loeschke's “Challenges of Portraying Emily Dickinson's in William Luce's Play ‘The Belle of Amherst’”, in the Emily Dickinson Journal, Niwot, CO (1993), 2:2, 124-129.
All references to Dickinson's letters (L) and prose fragments (PF) are taken from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, eds. Johnson and Ward, Cambridge, MA: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958.
Page 1Nature, my terror of midnight, my childlike wonder at love, my white renunciation. …
I read and re-read the … biographical studies, … her letters, … her poems. … Gradually, Emily's story emerged, as if she were telling it herself.
My colleagues … also pored over the Dickinson material. … We all seemed joined together in love in this enterprise of simple beauty. …
The Belle of Amherst is a love affair with language, a celebration of all that is beautiful and poignant in life. As it turns out, shy Miss Emily was writing for theater as surely as she breathed. In her every evocative phrase there is theatrical texture. On stage, the strange ways of Emily Dickinson become dramatic qualities in an arena large enough to give them the look of “divinest Sense” [Poem 435]. …3
To Luce's list could be added ‘my occasional submission, my sense of humiliation, my jealousy, my despair, my rage at injustice, my desire for vengeance, my biting scepticism, my pugnacity’, and many other of the rich range of feelings through which Dickinson takes us. Whe