Perhaps most controversial has been the series’ heavy focus on Dickinson’s steamy lifelong affair with her closest friend and sister-in-law Sue Gilbert - including a few wild sex scenes that thoroughly rewrite the prevailing illusion of Dickinson as chaste, melancholic hermit. You’d fancy it was a showrunner’s cheap titillation if it wasn’t so backed by existing evidence and reams of blush-inducing personal correspondence from Emily to Sue.

In short, by this point I’m not sure why the series isn’t already required viewing for teenage English classes everywhere.

“Oh my goodness, that would be a fun class!” laughs Steinfeld.

The series’ other key strength, the way it cleverly uses Dickinson’s literary preoccupations to mirror our modern struggles, continues through its final season.

While the series’ second season focused on Dickinson’s infamous anonymity, her active distrust towards being published and a belief that recognition and external validation would compromise an art she saw as pure cosmic communion, its final season is set amid the US Civil War of 1861-65, a period of intense productivity for Dickinson when she’s believed to have written “roughly half of her total number of poems”.

“I find it absolutely fascinating that this was known to be her most productive time as a writer, during the years of the Civil War,” says Steinfeld. “To think she was in this confined space yet feeling every bit of that pain and loss and emotion that was happening in that world, and able to channel it.”

The season’s Civil War turmoil, with its ever-deepening political divisions, proves uncannily familiar in the wake of the US’s January 6th hillbilly revolt, and lands on another topical dilemma: whether art can endure and make a real difference in periods of wider social upheaval. It’s a question many artists have pondered in our current maelstrom - the COVID pandemic, the George Floyd protests, the climate debacle - and an answer Steinfeld sees in Dickinson’s legacy.

“I had a moment when we were promoting the first season and there was this huge billboard of Emily Dickinson in the middle of Times Square and I looked up at this thing and I thought, if she only knew, right? That her work is living on in our world when we need it most,” says Steinfeld.

“It’s a really incredible thing,” she adds. “She had such an innate way of making people feel so seen and understood through her work, when she didn’t feel either of those things.”

Loading

Steinfeld, who earned a Peabody (for “delight”) with the show last year, says she’s proud of how the series wraps up and the extent to which its characters have evolved in a way that is “so beautifully messy and heartbreaking and just real”.

But the show’s legacy, whatever it might be, lives in the spirit of its namesake.

“When I first came on to do this show one of the reasons I fell in love with it was that not only did it feel so fresh and so unique and so different, but this was ultimately a show about not putting people in a box and not feeling like you have to conform to a certain behaviour or a societal standard, and that really remains throughout,” says Steinfeld.

“Although it goes to so many more places than that, it ultimately has always been about being yourself unapologetically. I just hope people continue to feel inspired by this show and this remarkable woman.”

Seasons 1 and 2 of Dickinson are available now on Apple TV+, with Season 3 premiering on Friday.