She rarely left her bedroom. 

She requested her papers be burned. 

And yet, Emily Dickinson is widely considered one of the English-speaking world’s greatest poets.  

BETC’s production of the one-woman show The Belle of Amherst invites you into the mystery of the reclusive woman who wrote those poems you read in high school.  She is a woman of magnitude, humor, and feeling– a woman who defied conventional society’s mores in order to find freedom through her pen.  

Award-winning Playwright Luce writes in his 1976 Author’s Notes for The Belle of Amherst:

“The essential Emily of my play is secretly saying to the audience:

  ‘Pardon my insanity, 

   Pardon my jubilation to Nature, my terror of midnight, 

   my childlike wonder at love, my white renunciation. 

  Nothing more do I ask than to share with you the ecstasy and sacrament of my life.’