In one of A Quiet Passion’s early scenes, the poet Emily Dickinson quips that “an argument about gender is an argument about war”. Terence Davies’s biopic of the 19th-century American writer sets itself up as a film About Gender, declaring its explicit interest in the war waged on women who write about their own misery.

We open with young Emily (Emma Bell) departing her all-girls seminary; the remainder of the film takes place almost entirely within the confines of the Dickinsons’ home in Amherst, Massachusetts. No matter the setting, both teenage Emily and the writer she eventually becomes (Cynthia Nixon, on blistering form) reject the religious framework forced on them. Each is invested in the matters of her soul; just not in the matter of its saving.

The first half plays like a colourful screwball comedy and mostly sees Dickinson bantering with new friend Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey), a wisecracking teacher with a tongue almost as razor-edged as her own. Nixon and Bailey have fun with the back and forth, though some may find their self-consciously witty repartee overly mannered. However, the pace lags and the tone soon turns morbid; Emily’s physical health deteriorates, with several gruelling scenes of her fitting and thrashing.

As time passes, Emily’s sparky contrariness calcifies into bitterness, the sharpness of her prose also lacerating her romantic prospects; the “meticulous guarding of her soul’s independence” creating a chasm between her success and her self-esteem. “In matters of the soul, you are rigorous,” says Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle) to her sister. Emily’s response? That “rigour is no substitute for happiness”. But deep down, Nixon’s Emily knows that marriage would constrict her creativity. This tension is the film’s main preoccupation and its most precise profundity: the blunt, exhausting pain of living alone and in one’s own head.