Amherst

December 22, 2014
Nicholson (The Trial of True Love) offers up a cinema-ready exploration of love and lust in New England past and present. Present-day heroine Alice, an aspiring screenwriter, travels from England to Amherst, Mass., to conduct research for her screenplay about Emily Dickinson’s affair. Alice’s own story—which includes a passionate affair with a much older man—alternates with the story of her historical subjects: Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin, and his younger lover, Mabel, the married wife of an Amherst College professor. Their story suggests that Emily, who permitted the couple to liaise in her house, was herself obsessed with Mabel, who eventually championed the poet’s work after Emily’s death. The historical segments—in many ways more vivid and lively than the somewhat melodramatic contemporary ones—are well researched, although passages from the subjects’ letters and diaries are injected awkwardly into the text. Both Austin and Mabel are complicated characters, and though there’s nice balance between the dual narratives, one senses that Nicholson struggled with the dilemma of how to impose a fictional story onto real-life events.