Success is sweetest to those who never succeed, but Apple has succeeded in securing Academy Award-nominated actress Hailee Steinfeld to star as Emily Dickinson in straight-to-series, according to Variety.
The new comedy series will be set in the 1800s, but will be told with a modern sensibility. It’ll explore social and gender constraints of the time told by a writer who doesn’t fit in it.
The series will be written by executive producer Alena Smith, who wrote for Showtime’s The Affair, and HBO’s The Newsroom. It will be directed by executive producer David Gordon Green, of Pineapple Express and Vice Principals.
Amherst, Massachusetts-born Emily Elizabeth Dickinson didn’t get out much during her life and has been described as a recluse, sometimes not even bothering to get out of bed for guests, so much of the series will be imaginative. Most of Dickinson friends she kept through letters. Her correspondences can correspond to the social media age, where a lot of people have never met some of their closest friends.
Dickinson sometimes couldn’t even be bothered putting titles on her poems, or in putting them out. Only about a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published in her lifetime. Her friends didn’t even know she wrote poems until after her death in 1886 when her younger sister Lavinia found them and had them published in 1890. When they were published they were forced to fit conventional poetic rules.
Dickinson is Steinfeld’s first regular role on a television series. She was 14 when starred alongside Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon in the Coen brothers’ 2010 remake of True Grit. She also starred in Pitch Perfect, The Edge Of Seventeen, Barely Lethal, The Homesman, and Ender’s Game. She is also a singer with platinum-selling singles and albums.
More as we get it.