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This Dark Night: Emily Bronte, A Life
Deborah Lutz compellingly captures Emily Jane Brontë, extraordinary poet and author of the incomparable Wuthering Heights, with deep insight and glorious prose.
Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was only twenty-seven-years old when she began work on one of the most important novels in the English language. Two years later in 1847, she completed Wuthering Heights. It took the world almost a century to catch up to Brontë’s masterpiece, and it has taken even longer to know Brontë—an elusive figure, with a ghostly legacy provoked by her early death and the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers.
Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, This Dark Night constructs a portrait of Brontë, her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and the effect of their sisters’ and mother’s tragic deaths. In the first full-length biography in over twenty years, renowned scholar Deborah Lutz sketches the days of a woman crafting otherworldly fiction while running her father’s writing interweaving with household work, daydreaming, and exploring the rough-hewn outdoors.
As she traces the influence of Brontë’s life and work, Lutz follows how Brontë’s fantastical early poems of the night sky, women rulers, and outsiders and rebels grew into the stormy, transcendent Wuthering Heights. Lutz also illuminates the overlooked ways that the legendary writer addressed debates of her time that still resonate today, including questions of gender and sexuality, race and class, and rapid industrialization set against the natural world.
From her menagerie of dogs and birds to the beloved moors that Brontë wandered and later emblazoned in her novel, Lutz depicts the passions of an author at odds with convention. Uniting the domestic and the cosmic, This Dark Night plumbs the life and writing of this idiosyncratic woman, dark soul, and monumental genius.
Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was only twenty-seven-years old when she began work on one of the most important novels in the English language. Two years later in 1847, she completed Wuthering Heights. It took the world almost a century to catch up to Brontë’s masterpiece, and it has taken even longer to know Brontë—an elusive figure, with a ghostly legacy provoked by her early death and the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers.
Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, This Dark Night constructs a portrait of Brontë, her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and the effect of their sisters’ and mother’s tragic deaths. In the first full-length biography in over twenty years, renowned scholar Deborah Lutz sketches the days of a woman crafting otherworldly fiction while running her father’s writing interweaving with household work, daydreaming, and exploring the rough-hewn outdoors.
As she traces the influence of Brontë’s life and work, Lutz follows how Brontë’s fantastical early poems of the night sky, women rulers, and outsiders and rebels grew into the stormy, transcendent Wuthering Heights. Lutz also illuminates the overlooked ways that the legendary writer addressed debates of her time that still resonate today, including questions of gender and sexuality, race and class, and rapid industrialization set against the natural world.
From her menagerie of dogs and birds to the beloved moors that Brontë wandered and later emblazoned in her novel, Lutz depicts the passions of an author at odds with convention. Uniting the domestic and the cosmic, This Dark Night plumbs the life and writing of this idiosyncratic woman, dark soul, and monumental genius.
351 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 5, 2026
About the author
Deborah Lutz
17 books82 followersDeborah Lutz is the Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature at Pennsylvania State University. A Guggenheim, Cullman, and NEH Fellow, she is the author of This Dark Night, The Brontë Cabinet, Pleasure Bound, and other works. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including the New York Times. She lives in Pennsylvania and New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 132 reviews
August 20, 2026
𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑠 𝑚𝑦 𝑏𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑀𝑎𝑦.ᐟ 𓆩♡𓆪
This was an absolute delight to read. So thorough, so insightful, so curious above all. What can't be known for sure, the author wonders, asks the reader to join in on the fun of wondering.
The life of the Brontës is fascinating: a troupe of poets (and, in a way, actors) brought up in a parish house in the middle of wild, open nature, raised by a widower cleric father who admitted an immense amount of progressive and transgressive thinking from his daughters — to the point that even nowadays he would be considered forward-thinking and somewhat relaxed. The siblings had a comfortable home, a loving family, and the most important creative tool of all, time, and within their bond they created entire worlds, where they lived out their loves and fears with an intensity they couldn't exercise often in "real" life.
Emily's was a life marked by grief, contemplation, and introspection. While I was reading, I kept trying to imagine what it was like to live in a place so immediately and completely, unequivocally surrounded by imposing, overwhelming nature. Not only nature in the greenery sense — an enormous variety of fauna and flora with little disturbance to explore, an unchanging landscape for the most part of her life, with an openness of sky and land that I honestly don't believe I've ever known in my modern, urban little life — but nature in the sense of life and death cycling constantly in full view of the Brontës, of raw human condition being taken to extremes in sudden illnesses and departures, of decomposing bodies overwhelming the church's cemetery plot so much so that the very soil was becoming unstable, the environment toxic.
Something I found out reading the book is that there was an element of Buddhist fervor in Emily's behaviour: keeping silent, observing, not reacting, exercising restraint (sometimes to the point of asceticism) as a core value, spending entire days in deep meditation in the woods around her house, all on her own, being content with her reality rather than desiring otherwise, appreciating the labour of domestic life, finding purpose in it. She had a room of her own everywhere she went.
The book does a fantastic job of piecing together the incredibly fragmented and incomplete Brontë archives to weave a narrative that manages to stay on chronological track, providing deep context of not only the happenings of their lives, the events that led them to fame, but also of the surroundings of their lives — what they ate and heard and read and discussed and attended and smelled and wore — creating an atmosphere that follows throughout the book even for someone like me, with little to no knowledge of Victorian history. The author also dives deeply into Emily's poetry, not shying away from the task of analyzing it from a literary as well as a historical point of view all at once. People who know of Wuthering Heights but don't know of Emily's poetry (which I believe to be a majority) will finish the book with a vast comprehension of this side of her.
Also, December 19 is now officially my Reread Wuthering Heights holiday.
"From early on, this was a home where girls created, performed, and wrote fiction with confidence. It seemed a natural activity for them. It was never curtailed or censored as being too masculine or unfit for girls who should be trained up as mothers and wives — common attitudes at the time. Emily would step right into this world, a woman writer born and bred." 💗💖💓💖💞💝💕💝💓💖💗💘💞💕💘💝💓💖💓💕💘💖
This was an absolute delight to read. So thorough, so insightful, so curious above all. What can't be known for sure, the author wonders, asks the reader to join in on the fun of wondering.
The life of the Brontës is fascinating: a troupe of poets (and, in a way, actors) brought up in a parish house in the middle of wild, open nature, raised by a widower cleric father who admitted an immense amount of progressive and transgressive thinking from his daughters — to the point that even nowadays he would be considered forward-thinking and somewhat relaxed. The siblings had a comfortable home, a loving family, and the most important creative tool of all, time, and within their bond they created entire worlds, where they lived out their loves and fears with an intensity they couldn't exercise often in "real" life.
Emily's was a life marked by grief, contemplation, and introspection. While I was reading, I kept trying to imagine what it was like to live in a place so immediately and completely, unequivocally surrounded by imposing, overwhelming nature. Not only nature in the greenery sense — an enormous variety of fauna and flora with little disturbance to explore, an unchanging landscape for the most part of her life, with an openness of sky and land that I honestly don't believe I've ever known in my modern, urban little life — but nature in the sense of life and death cycling constantly in full view of the Brontës, of raw human condition being taken to extremes in sudden illnesses and departures, of decomposing bodies overwhelming the church's cemetery plot so much so that the very soil was becoming unstable, the environment toxic.
Something I found out reading the book is that there was an element of Buddhist fervor in Emily's behaviour: keeping silent, observing, not reacting, exercising restraint (sometimes to the point of asceticism) as a core value, spending entire days in deep meditation in the woods around her house, all on her own, being content with her reality rather than desiring otherwise, appreciating the labour of domestic life, finding purpose in it. She had a room of her own everywhere she went.
The book does a fantastic job of piecing together the incredibly fragmented and incomplete Brontë archives to weave a narrative that manages to stay on chronological track, providing deep context of not only the happenings of their lives, the events that led them to fame, but also of the surroundings of their lives — what they ate and heard and read and discussed and attended and smelled and wore — creating an atmosphere that follows throughout the book even for someone like me, with little to no knowledge of Victorian history. The author also dives deeply into Emily's poetry, not shying away from the task of analyzing it from a literary as well as a historical point of view all at once. People who know of Wuthering Heights but don't know of Emily's poetry (which I believe to be a majority) will finish the book with a vast comprehension of this side of her.
Also, December 19 is now officially my Reread Wuthering Heights holiday.
"From early on, this was a home where girls created, performed, and wrote fiction with confidence. It seemed a natural activity for them. It was never curtailed or censored as being too masculine or unfit for girls who should be trained up as mothers and wives — common attitudes at the time. Emily would step right into this world, a woman writer born and bred." 💗💖💓💖💞💝💕💝💓💖💗💘💞💕💘💝💓💖💓💕💘💖
May 12, 2026
3.25 After reading Wuthering Heights and watching the BBC’s To Walk Invisible, I was eager to learn more about what kind of environment produced not one, but three, female authors in the 1800s. This biography breaks Emily’s life into chronological segments, offering a deep look at the Brontë family dynamic.
The author is transparent about how much of Emily’s personal work and history was destroyed, which is a detail that aligns with other accounts I’ve seen. However, because so much is missing from the historical record, I occasionally found myself questioning how certain specific details could be known. If you go into it keeping that in mind, it is an enjoyable and informative read. I actually wish I had read this before Wuthering Heights, as it sheds so much light on Emily’s creative choices and the overall atmosphere of her writing.
The author is transparent about how much of Emily’s personal work and history was destroyed, which is a detail that aligns with other accounts I’ve seen. However, because so much is missing from the historical record, I occasionally found myself questioning how certain specific details could be known. If you go into it keeping that in mind, it is an enjoyable and informative read. I actually wish I had read this before Wuthering Heights, as it sheds so much light on Emily’s creative choices and the overall atmosphere of her writing.
January 31, 2026
Absolute masterpiece. A lyrical, highly-researched and myth-busting must-read.
Read
July 17, 2026Ovo je bilo sjajno i neverovatno zanimljivo i odličan je uvod za revisit Orkanskih visova 🧡
April 4, 2026
The was such a beautiful biography of Emily Brontë that I was left practically in tears by the end of it. Inspired by the TikTok trend, I’ve been embarking in a personal curriculum on Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights. I found this book in my search for a book about her life that wasn’t 500+ pages. It’s hard to know a lot about Emily because so many of her papers were lost/destroyed. But this author did a wonderful job conveying the story of her life. I went into this book thinking I would have little in common with a moody Victorian woman living on the Yorkshire moors, but as I learned more about her life, I found more glimmers of Emily in myself than I would have ever expected. I highly recommend this book for fans of Wuthering Heights or anyone looking for a biography of a tragic, fascinating, genius unrecognized in her own time.
August 16, 2026
I love Wuthering Heights and Emily Brontë’s poetry. I was excited to read this biography and learn more about my favorite author, but unfortunately it didn’t teach me too many new things. I guess watching a few documentaries and listening to the Brontë Parsonage Podcast already revealed all there is to know about Emily. Of course there is so much we’ll never know and I imagine it’s very hard to write an entire book about a person who lived 200 years ago, died so young and didn’t become well-known until after her death. To fill in the gaps I feel like the author of this book speculated and guessed quite a lot. I think I would have preferred a shorter book that stuck to the facts alone, though it did make for a smooth read.
The book wasn’t just about Emily, either. The rest of her family takes up just as much space on these pages. The title and summary were a little misleading in that respect. I wonder if the choice was made to ride the coat tails of Wuthering Heights’ renewed popularity.
While there was a lot to grumble about, I did enjoy this book. I liked learning bits and pieces about nineteenth century life and it is always enjoyable to dive into the Brontë world, grab Emily’s hand and go for a ramble on the moors and watch over her shoulder as she pens down her poetic words.
3.5 stars.
The book wasn’t just about Emily, either. The rest of her family takes up just as much space on these pages. The title and summary were a little misleading in that respect. I wonder if the choice was made to ride the coat tails of Wuthering Heights’ renewed popularity.
While there was a lot to grumble about, I did enjoy this book. I liked learning bits and pieces about nineteenth century life and it is always enjoyable to dive into the Brontë world, grab Emily’s hand and go for a ramble on the moors and watch over her shoulder as she pens down her poetic words.
3.5 stars.
July 7, 2026
3.5 stars
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Sadly, this was not a particularly strong biography. I appreciate what Lutz was trying to achieve (an emotional resonance with Emily brought about through facts, probabilities, and poetic prose), but I didn’t really gel with this text. I like my non-fiction to be more exact, less fluffy, and with an academic tone. Because I didn’t get on well with the narrative style, it then made the book feel like a slog rather than a page turner. Love my girl Emily, but this biography just didn’t hit the mark. Juliet Barker’s work remains the most authoritative when it comes to the beloved Brontë sisters.
Kind thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for my thoughts.
Kind thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for my thoughts.
June 21, 2026
I’d call This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life by Deborah Lutz the rare literary biography that feels haunted by its subject. Not haunted in the cheap Gothic sense, but in the way the moors haunt Wuthering Heights: a persistent presence, a voice carried on the wind, impossible to fully grasp and yet impossible to forget. Lutz has achieved something remarkable here. She has written what may well be the quintessential biography of Emily Brontë—not because she solves every mystery surrounding Emily, but because she understands that mystery itself is central to who Emily was.
For generations, Emily Brontë has existed less as a historical figure than as a myth. She is “wild Emily,” the solitary genius wandering the Yorkshire moors, speaking more easily to dogs and wind than to society. She is the author who produced one of the greatest novels ever written and then vanished from the world before she could explain it. Every biographer who approaches her faces the same challenge: how do you write the life of a woman who left behind so little of herself?
Lutz’s answer is elegant. Rather than forcing certainty where none exists, she reconstructs Emily’s world with extraordinary sensitivity. She gives us the texture of Haworth, the rhythms of the parsonage, the harsh beauty of the moorland landscape, and the intimate, complicated web of the Brontë family. The result is a biography that feels alive rather than merely informative.
Emily’s life, on paper, appears almost startlingly small. Born in 1818, the fifth surviving child of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë, she spent nearly all her life in Haworth. Her mother died when Emily was young. Soon afterward, her two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, perished following their experiences at the grim Clergy Daughters’ School. These losses cast long shadows over the remaining Brontë children: Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne.
Lutz traces how the siblings responded to grief by creating worlds. The famous juvenilia—the kingdoms of Angria and Gondal—emerge not as quaint childhood games but as foundational acts of imagination. Emily, alongside Anne, built Gondal into a vast realm of passion, warfare, betrayal, and longing. Reading about these writings, one can already see the seeds of Wuthering Heights: the fierce emotional intensity, the refusal to separate love from destruction, the sense that human feeling can be as violent and untamable as nature itself.
What makes this biography so compelling is the way Lutz refuses to flatten Emily into a stereotype. Too often, Emily has been reduced to a lonely recluse who stumbled into genius. Here, she becomes a fuller and stranger figure. We see her devotion to animals, her fierce attachment to home, her discomfort in conventional social settings, and her profound inner life. She was shy, certainly, but not weak. Reserved, but not passive. There is a toughness to Emily that Lutz captures beautifully.
Indeed, one of the biography’s greatest strengths is its insistence on Emily’s strength. This was a woman who endured loss after loss and yet maintained an astonishing independence of mind. She did not court approval. She did not seek literary fame in the way Charlotte often did. There is something almost elemental about her character. Reading Lutz’s account, I was reminded again and again that Emily Brontë seems less like a Victorian author than a force of nature.
The heart of the biography, naturally, is the creation of Wuthering Heights. Even now, nearly two centuries after its publication, the novel retains its power to shock. It remains unruly, difficult, and magnificent. Lutz places the book within the context of Emily’s life without reducing it to autobiography. She understands that the temptation to explain Heathcliff and Catherine through biographical parallels ultimately diminishes the novel’s achievement.
Instead, she shows how Emily’s imagination transformed the materials of her world into something immortal. The moors became a spiritual landscape. Human passion became mythic. Love became a force that could survive death itself.
That immortality is perhaps the biography’s central theme. Emily lived only thirty years. She published a single novel and a small body of poetry. By ordinary measures, her life was brief and narrow. Yet her influence feels boundless. Lutz repeatedly returns to the strange contradiction at the center of Emily’s legacy: how could someone who lived such a secluded life create work that speaks so powerfully across centuries?
The answer, of course, lies in the work itself. Emily possessed an almost supernatural understanding of emotional truth. She stripped away social conventions and exposed something rawer underneath. Reading her today feels startlingly modern because she was never interested in polite surfaces. She was interested in obsession, longing, grief, rage, ecstasy—the feelings that remain constant regardless of era.
Lutz also handles the darker chapters of the Brontë story with great care. Branwell’s decline, the deaths that devastated the family, and Emily’s own final illness are rendered with heartbreaking clarity. Emily’s death, in particular, remains one of the most moving episodes in literary history. Refusing medical treatment, continuing her household duties despite severe illness, she seemed determined to meet death on her own terms. There is something tragic and awe-inspiring about her final months.
And yet the biography never descends into sentimentality. Lutz understands that Emily herself would likely have rejected such treatment. Instead, she presents her as she was: stubborn, brilliant, difficult, loving, private, and utterly singular.
What I admired most about This Dark Night is its atmosphere. Many literary biographies feel like archives brought to life. This one feels like literature. Lutz writes with a lyrical precision that mirrors her subject without imitating her. The pages are filled with weather, landscape, memory, and silence. One comes away not merely informed about Emily Brontë but immersed in her world.
By the end, I found myself experiencing the peculiar melancholy that accompanies all great biographies. We learn more about Emily than we knew before, yet she remains elusive. Perhaps that is inevitable. Perhaps it is even fitting. Emily Brontë has always existed at the border between history and legend.
Deborah Lutz understands this better than any previous biographer I have read. Rather than trying to tame wild Emily, she follows her onto the moors.
The result is a magnificent work of literary scholarship and storytelling. If Wuthering Heights is the definitive expression of Emily Brontë’s imagination, then This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life may be the definitive account of the life behind it. Richly researched, beautifully written, and deeply humane, it captures both the woman and the myth without sacrificing either.
For readers fascinated by the Brontës, this book feels essential. For admirers of Emily, it feels revelatory. And for anyone who has ever stood in awe of the immortal brilliance of that strange, fierce genius from Haworth, it is nothing short of extraordinary. Emily remains untamed, unknowable, and eternal. Deborah Lutz has come closer than anyone to showing us why.
For generations, Emily Brontë has existed less as a historical figure than as a myth. She is “wild Emily,” the solitary genius wandering the Yorkshire moors, speaking more easily to dogs and wind than to society. She is the author who produced one of the greatest novels ever written and then vanished from the world before she could explain it. Every biographer who approaches her faces the same challenge: how do you write the life of a woman who left behind so little of herself?
Lutz’s answer is elegant. Rather than forcing certainty where none exists, she reconstructs Emily’s world with extraordinary sensitivity. She gives us the texture of Haworth, the rhythms of the parsonage, the harsh beauty of the moorland landscape, and the intimate, complicated web of the Brontë family. The result is a biography that feels alive rather than merely informative.
Emily’s life, on paper, appears almost startlingly small. Born in 1818, the fifth surviving child of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë, she spent nearly all her life in Haworth. Her mother died when Emily was young. Soon afterward, her two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, perished following their experiences at the grim Clergy Daughters’ School. These losses cast long shadows over the remaining Brontë children: Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne.
Lutz traces how the siblings responded to grief by creating worlds. The famous juvenilia—the kingdoms of Angria and Gondal—emerge not as quaint childhood games but as foundational acts of imagination. Emily, alongside Anne, built Gondal into a vast realm of passion, warfare, betrayal, and longing. Reading about these writings, one can already see the seeds of Wuthering Heights: the fierce emotional intensity, the refusal to separate love from destruction, the sense that human feeling can be as violent and untamable as nature itself.
What makes this biography so compelling is the way Lutz refuses to flatten Emily into a stereotype. Too often, Emily has been reduced to a lonely recluse who stumbled into genius. Here, she becomes a fuller and stranger figure. We see her devotion to animals, her fierce attachment to home, her discomfort in conventional social settings, and her profound inner life. She was shy, certainly, but not weak. Reserved, but not passive. There is a toughness to Emily that Lutz captures beautifully.
Indeed, one of the biography’s greatest strengths is its insistence on Emily’s strength. This was a woman who endured loss after loss and yet maintained an astonishing independence of mind. She did not court approval. She did not seek literary fame in the way Charlotte often did. There is something almost elemental about her character. Reading Lutz’s account, I was reminded again and again that Emily Brontë seems less like a Victorian author than a force of nature.
The heart of the biography, naturally, is the creation of Wuthering Heights. Even now, nearly two centuries after its publication, the novel retains its power to shock. It remains unruly, difficult, and magnificent. Lutz places the book within the context of Emily’s life without reducing it to autobiography. She understands that the temptation to explain Heathcliff and Catherine through biographical parallels ultimately diminishes the novel’s achievement.
Instead, she shows how Emily’s imagination transformed the materials of her world into something immortal. The moors became a spiritual landscape. Human passion became mythic. Love became a force that could survive death itself.
That immortality is perhaps the biography’s central theme. Emily lived only thirty years. She published a single novel and a small body of poetry. By ordinary measures, her life was brief and narrow. Yet her influence feels boundless. Lutz repeatedly returns to the strange contradiction at the center of Emily’s legacy: how could someone who lived such a secluded life create work that speaks so powerfully across centuries?
The answer, of course, lies in the work itself. Emily possessed an almost supernatural understanding of emotional truth. She stripped away social conventions and exposed something rawer underneath. Reading her today feels startlingly modern because she was never interested in polite surfaces. She was interested in obsession, longing, grief, rage, ecstasy—the feelings that remain constant regardless of era.
Lutz also handles the darker chapters of the Brontë story with great care. Branwell’s decline, the deaths that devastated the family, and Emily’s own final illness are rendered with heartbreaking clarity. Emily’s death, in particular, remains one of the most moving episodes in literary history. Refusing medical treatment, continuing her household duties despite severe illness, she seemed determined to meet death on her own terms. There is something tragic and awe-inspiring about her final months.
And yet the biography never descends into sentimentality. Lutz understands that Emily herself would likely have rejected such treatment. Instead, she presents her as she was: stubborn, brilliant, difficult, loving, private, and utterly singular.
What I admired most about This Dark Night is its atmosphere. Many literary biographies feel like archives brought to life. This one feels like literature. Lutz writes with a lyrical precision that mirrors her subject without imitating her. The pages are filled with weather, landscape, memory, and silence. One comes away not merely informed about Emily Brontë but immersed in her world.
By the end, I found myself experiencing the peculiar melancholy that accompanies all great biographies. We learn more about Emily than we knew before, yet she remains elusive. Perhaps that is inevitable. Perhaps it is even fitting. Emily Brontë has always existed at the border between history and legend.
Deborah Lutz understands this better than any previous biographer I have read. Rather than trying to tame wild Emily, she follows her onto the moors.
The result is a magnificent work of literary scholarship and storytelling. If Wuthering Heights is the definitive expression of Emily Brontë’s imagination, then This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life may be the definitive account of the life behind it. Richly researched, beautifully written, and deeply humane, it captures both the woman and the myth without sacrificing either.
For readers fascinated by the Brontës, this book feels essential. For admirers of Emily, it feels revelatory. And for anyone who has ever stood in awe of the immortal brilliance of that strange, fierce genius from Haworth, it is nothing short of extraordinary. Emily remains untamed, unknowable, and eternal. Deborah Lutz has come closer than anyone to showing us why.
July 29, 2026
This is a treasure for fans of any Brontë novel. We learn about all three sisters (mainly because much of what we know of Emily was preserved in Charlotte’s writings), but of course Emily is the hero.
There’s special emphasis given to Emily as a poet (which I loved). She was also an animal lover. Lutz paints her as genius, unconventional, fiscally responsible, a general “can’t be bothered with what doesn’t interest me” attitude, naturalist, contributing family member, and devoted sister.
Emily sounds like the kind of person I can love and admire from afar but probably would not have been friends with because she’d consider me beneath her notice—not in a snobby way but in a “she’s not a dog or a bird so I just don’t care that much” kind of way.
This is clearly a work where passion, pride, and love of subject in the author meets with research, archival work, and scholarship. It’s a book for Brontë lovers written by a Brontë lover.
Lutz brings Emily alive as an extremely practical, intelligent, no nonsense, rough, wild, and untamed figure of interest. She is part and parcel of the landscape she lived in, and in her writing she has explained its beauty and horror and preserved it forever. Lovers of WH will love this book.
And can I just take a moment to appreciate the gorgeous cover art? Whoever is responsible, I take my hat off to you. Those colors suit Emily’s ethos perfectly.
One more thing: when the movie “Wuthering Heights” came out, there was *a lot* of talk/complaining online that Heathcliff was cast as white because he is so clearly supposed to be a man of color in the book. I appreciate how Lutz acknowledged that may be the case, but he could also have been from Irish origin (who were also considered a lesser race) and that 1) his skin color is ambiguous and 2) we can’t assume Emily was thinking of skin color and race in the same way we do today. This aligns with what I know of the time period and the way I read the book. That being said, Lutz definitely acknowledges the racial ambiguity and gives evidence of the Brontë strong abolitionist position.
There’s special emphasis given to Emily as a poet (which I loved). She was also an animal lover. Lutz paints her as genius, unconventional, fiscally responsible, a general “can’t be bothered with what doesn’t interest me” attitude, naturalist, contributing family member, and devoted sister.
Emily sounds like the kind of person I can love and admire from afar but probably would not have been friends with because she’d consider me beneath her notice—not in a snobby way but in a “she’s not a dog or a bird so I just don’t care that much” kind of way.
This is clearly a work where passion, pride, and love of subject in the author meets with research, archival work, and scholarship. It’s a book for Brontë lovers written by a Brontë lover.
Lutz brings Emily alive as an extremely practical, intelligent, no nonsense, rough, wild, and untamed figure of interest. She is part and parcel of the landscape she lived in, and in her writing she has explained its beauty and horror and preserved it forever. Lovers of WH will love this book.
And can I just take a moment to appreciate the gorgeous cover art? Whoever is responsible, I take my hat off to you. Those colors suit Emily’s ethos perfectly.
One more thing: when the movie “Wuthering Heights” came out, there was *a lot* of talk/complaining online that Heathcliff was cast as white because he is so clearly supposed to be a man of color in the book. I appreciate how Lutz acknowledged that may be the case, but he could also have been from Irish origin (who were also considered a lesser race) and that 1) his skin color is ambiguous and 2) we can’t assume Emily was thinking of skin color and race in the same way we do today. This aligns with what I know of the time period and the way I read the book. That being said, Lutz definitely acknowledges the racial ambiguity and gives evidence of the Brontë strong abolitionist position.
July 3, 2026
My favourite of the three Brontë sisters has always been Emily; although I love Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I love Wuthering Heights more and I also find Emily herself the most interesting and intriguing person of the three. When I came across this new biography by Deborah Lutz, then, I knew I wanted to read it. I’ve read other books about the Brontës – mainly fictional ones such as Dark Quartet by Lynne Reid Banks and The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan – but I liked the idea of one with a specific focus on Emily.
The book takes us through Emily’s entire life, beginning with her birth in 1818, the fifth of six children. When Emily was three, her mother died, leaving the children to be raised by their aunt and their father, Patrick Brontë, an Irish clergyman. Growing up in a parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire, Emily and her younger sister Anne developed their writing skills with a series of poems and stories set in the imaginary world of Gondal. Although most of this material has been lost, some of Emily’s Gondal poems still exist and Lutz uses them to explore what they can tell us about Emily as a person and how they provided the foundation that led to the writing of Wuthering Heights.
Emily’s early life was marked by various tragedies – just a few years after her mother’s death, her two eldest sisters also died of tuberculosis, having fallen ill at Cowan Bridge School (the model for Lowood School in Jane Eyre). As Patrick was reluctant to let his three surviving daughters attend school after this, Charlotte, Emily and Anne were largely educated at home. Rarely mixing with people outside the family, Emily didn’t make friends easily and was seen as a quiet, reclusive, fiercely private person. As an adult, although she briefly worked as a teacher and studied in Brussels with Charlotte, Emily continued to spend most of her time at home, managing the household and caring for her father and brother, Branwell, who was descending into alcoholism, having failed in his attempts to establish a literary career of his own.
Emily died in December 1848 at the age of thirty, just three months after Branwell and five months before Anne, all probably of tuberculosis. Charlotte, the only sibling to marry, died seven years later from complications during a pregnancy. It’s thought that the insanitary conditions in the village of Haworth, including a water supply contaminated by the nearby graveyard may have contributed to the poor health of the Brontë family.
As Emily left so little of her own work and correspondence behind, most of what we know of her comes from letters written by Charlotte and her friend, Ellen Nussey. Because we don’t have much insight into what Emily herself may have been thinking or feeling, a lot of this biography is based on speculation – ‘Emily probably thought’ or ‘it’s possible that Emily felt’ – as well as a general overview of the world in which Emily lived and how things she saw or experienced may have influenced her character and work. It also seems that almost as much attention is given to Charlotte and Anne, although that’s understandable as the lives and careers of the three sisters are so closely connected.
Something that comes across strongly is how exceptionally talented Emily was. Obviously, her writing is discussed in detail: her poems including the Gondal poetry; Wuthering Heights, the difficulty she had in getting it published and the way it was reviewed at the time; and the second novel she was working on at the time of her death, which has sadly never been found. However, Emily was also an accomplished pianist and a gifted artist – some of her artwork is reproduced in the book, including her wonderful drawings of her dogs. Her achievements are particularly impressive when you remember that she spent very little time at school and was mostly self-educated.
Although I can’t say that I learned a lot from this book (maybe because, as I’ve mentioned, there’s simply not that much we can learn due to the limited information available), I did enjoy reading it. It doesn’t feel too academic and is an easy book to read. For those who want to dig deeper, there are notes, references and a bibliography at the end of the book, but otherwise I think this would probably be a good introduction to the lives of Emily and her siblings.
The book takes us through Emily’s entire life, beginning with her birth in 1818, the fifth of six children. When Emily was three, her mother died, leaving the children to be raised by their aunt and their father, Patrick Brontë, an Irish clergyman. Growing up in a parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire, Emily and her younger sister Anne developed their writing skills with a series of poems and stories set in the imaginary world of Gondal. Although most of this material has been lost, some of Emily’s Gondal poems still exist and Lutz uses them to explore what they can tell us about Emily as a person and how they provided the foundation that led to the writing of Wuthering Heights.
Emily’s early life was marked by various tragedies – just a few years after her mother’s death, her two eldest sisters also died of tuberculosis, having fallen ill at Cowan Bridge School (the model for Lowood School in Jane Eyre). As Patrick was reluctant to let his three surviving daughters attend school after this, Charlotte, Emily and Anne were largely educated at home. Rarely mixing with people outside the family, Emily didn’t make friends easily and was seen as a quiet, reclusive, fiercely private person. As an adult, although she briefly worked as a teacher and studied in Brussels with Charlotte, Emily continued to spend most of her time at home, managing the household and caring for her father and brother, Branwell, who was descending into alcoholism, having failed in his attempts to establish a literary career of his own.
Emily died in December 1848 at the age of thirty, just three months after Branwell and five months before Anne, all probably of tuberculosis. Charlotte, the only sibling to marry, died seven years later from complications during a pregnancy. It’s thought that the insanitary conditions in the village of Haworth, including a water supply contaminated by the nearby graveyard may have contributed to the poor health of the Brontë family.
As Emily left so little of her own work and correspondence behind, most of what we know of her comes from letters written by Charlotte and her friend, Ellen Nussey. Because we don’t have much insight into what Emily herself may have been thinking or feeling, a lot of this biography is based on speculation – ‘Emily probably thought’ or ‘it’s possible that Emily felt’ – as well as a general overview of the world in which Emily lived and how things she saw or experienced may have influenced her character and work. It also seems that almost as much attention is given to Charlotte and Anne, although that’s understandable as the lives and careers of the three sisters are so closely connected.
Something that comes across strongly is how exceptionally talented Emily was. Obviously, her writing is discussed in detail: her poems including the Gondal poetry; Wuthering Heights, the difficulty she had in getting it published and the way it was reviewed at the time; and the second novel she was working on at the time of her death, which has sadly never been found. However, Emily was also an accomplished pianist and a gifted artist – some of her artwork is reproduced in the book, including her wonderful drawings of her dogs. Her achievements are particularly impressive when you remember that she spent very little time at school and was mostly self-educated.
Although I can’t say that I learned a lot from this book (maybe because, as I’ve mentioned, there’s simply not that much we can learn due to the limited information available), I did enjoy reading it. It doesn’t feel too academic and is an easy book to read. For those who want to dig deeper, there are notes, references and a bibliography at the end of the book, but otherwise I think this would probably be a good introduction to the lives of Emily and her siblings.
June 19, 2026
Excellent! One of the best accounts I’ve read.
July 4, 2026
I did not understand the scale of the Brontë sisters' imaginations until I read this book.
They used everything.
The landscape. The newspapers. Politics. Religion. Death. Illness. Their brother. The families they worked for. The people they watched. The limitations placed on women.
So much of what eventually appeared in their books came from somewhere in their actual lives.
They noticed everything and it made its way into their novels.
I learned so much reading Deborah Lutz's biography of Emily Brontë.
These young women were wildly creative and intelligent. Their minds were constantly taking in the world around them and finding a place for it in their writing.
And then Emily writes Wuthering Heights…
Sigh.
Emily was creative across every domain.
I was so impressed by her paintings, which are included in a section of the book.
Really, the whole Brontë family, starting with their parents, was gifted in the arts.
I had the chance to attend a talk with Deborah Lutz after finishing the book, which was so wonderful!
Her insight and devotion to maintaining the integrity of Emily Brontë's life really impacted me.
I asked her if there was a passage in Wuthering Heights that she now reads completely differently after writing This Dark Night.
Her answer was yes.
One of the poems Nelly reads near the beginning of the novel now has a completely different and much more heartfelt significance to her after she researched its meaning.
I loved that answer.
That's exactly what this biography did for me.
It gave me another way into Emily's work.
I can already tell that when I read Wuthering Heights again, I'm going to see things I didn't know to look for before.
I definitely recommend this to anyone who loves any of the Brontës' novels.
Lutz goes deeply into the whole family and the worlds that shaped their writing, with Emily at the center, of course.
I have so much respect for someone who spends years in archives, following tiny pieces of a life, trying to bring us closer to the truth about one of the most famous authors of all time.
They used everything.
The landscape. The newspapers. Politics. Religion. Death. Illness. Their brother. The families they worked for. The people they watched. The limitations placed on women.
So much of what eventually appeared in their books came from somewhere in their actual lives.
They noticed everything and it made its way into their novels.
I learned so much reading Deborah Lutz's biography of Emily Brontë.
These young women were wildly creative and intelligent. Their minds were constantly taking in the world around them and finding a place for it in their writing.
And then Emily writes Wuthering Heights…
Sigh.
Emily was creative across every domain.
I was so impressed by her paintings, which are included in a section of the book.
Really, the whole Brontë family, starting with their parents, was gifted in the arts.
I had the chance to attend a talk with Deborah Lutz after finishing the book, which was so wonderful!
Her insight and devotion to maintaining the integrity of Emily Brontë's life really impacted me.
I asked her if there was a passage in Wuthering Heights that she now reads completely differently after writing This Dark Night.
Her answer was yes.
One of the poems Nelly reads near the beginning of the novel now has a completely different and much more heartfelt significance to her after she researched its meaning.
I loved that answer.
That's exactly what this biography did for me.
It gave me another way into Emily's work.
I can already tell that when I read Wuthering Heights again, I'm going to see things I didn't know to look for before.
I definitely recommend this to anyone who loves any of the Brontës' novels.
Lutz goes deeply into the whole family and the worlds that shaped their writing, with Emily at the center, of course.
I have so much respect for someone who spends years in archives, following tiny pieces of a life, trying to bring us closer to the truth about one of the most famous authors of all time.
May 13, 2026
This is one of the most entertaining biographies I ever read, I am not a fun of biographies because I think you have to be very passionate about the subjects to really enjoy the detail that frequently abound in this type of books. Although this book is detailed and very well researched, I enjoyed the writing and the exploration of new aspects in the lives of the Bronte sisters, especially of Emily. Some of these were never brought to light so respectfully before. I would recommend this book even if you are not that into the Brontes, because the portraying of the historical context is amazing.
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April 26, 2026Anyone wanting to learn about the life of Emily Brontë is going to come up against an insuperable obstacle: there are just not nearly as many primary sources for her life as there are for her sister Charlotte. That means that biographies are not likely to really unearth any new facts, and so in a way there's not much to distinguish a biography of Emily from one of the many biographies of her family.
BUT, if you are a huge Emily Brontë fan and you really want a book focused on her, what you might appreciate about Deborah Lutz's new book is that she explores Emily's poetry by way of adding some depth to the biographical facts. And she does a creditable job in outlining this rather enigmatic woman without speculating *too* wildly.
I previously read Lutz's book, The Brontë Cabinet, and enjoyed it except for a few assumptions/interpretations that I questioned. The same caveats apply here.
Thanks to W W Norton for providing me with this advance copy via Netgalley.
BUT, if you are a huge Emily Brontë fan and you really want a book focused on her, what you might appreciate about Deborah Lutz's new book is that she explores Emily's poetry by way of adding some depth to the biographical facts. And she does a creditable job in outlining this rather enigmatic woman without speculating *too* wildly.
I previously read Lutz's book, The Brontë Cabinet, and enjoyed it except for a few assumptions/interpretations that I questioned. The same caveats apply here.
Thanks to W W Norton for providing me with this advance copy via Netgalley.
August 19, 2026
I've never read such a beautiful, lyrical biography before; it explored Emily's life and work in such a richly moving way. Never has a biography stimulated my imagination so. It makes me want to go out and create. This will sound silly, but it reminded me of the 'Looking Back' section of American Girl books, a favorite thing from my childhood. Of course, on a much grander and more beautiful scale. Giving that glimpse into the past, I loved all the small, intricate details about what life would have been like. Felt like stepping back in time.
Started this randomly, and I’m so happy to have found this new favorite.
Started this randomly, and I’m so happy to have found this new favorite.
May 11, 2026
A gorgeous portrait of Emily Brontë, written in a lyrical and accessible prose style while bristling with (unobtrusive) citations to a vast body of research.
Always the most elusive of the Brontës, Emily has been unjustly portrayed as an odd social isolate incapable of coping with work or life, a portrait that had its roots in Elizabeth Gaskell's famous biography of Emily's older sister, Charlotte. While Gaskell's book established Emily as a stoic eccentric, it did little to explain how she came to be the author of Wuthering Heights, an intense psycho-sexual drama rooted in the Yorkshire landscape. Lutz, conversely, pays close attention to not only Brontë's childhood games and writing but also her early and profound losses of both her mother and two sisters (buried nearly directly under the family pew in the church where the father, Patrick, preached). In a characteristic passage, she describes how this pew was too short to fit the entire family without some members--usually Anne and Emily--having to sit turned away from the congregation. In Lutz's explanation, this becomes not a defiance of sociability but an effort to cope with the intense trauma of living in a death-infused environment.
One of the mysteries of the Brontë sisters is how three women in such remote geographical and literary circumstances could craft such brilliant fiction: Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's too-often overlooked The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. But by turning to the previous generation and exploring the literary tastes and writing ambitions of their parents, Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell, Lutz offers helpful context for both the feminist inclinations of the authors' novels and their immersion in the contemporary fiction of their day.
This is a gorgeous, long overdue account that examines Emily Brontë as a writer of landscape, and one of the author's minor strengths is her close attention to Yorkshire diction, with words like "flittermice" (a local term for bats) offering a sense of how place infuses Brontë's language in her choice of key terms like "wuthering."
Always the most elusive of the Brontës, Emily has been unjustly portrayed as an odd social isolate incapable of coping with work or life, a portrait that had its roots in Elizabeth Gaskell's famous biography of Emily's older sister, Charlotte. While Gaskell's book established Emily as a stoic eccentric, it did little to explain how she came to be the author of Wuthering Heights, an intense psycho-sexual drama rooted in the Yorkshire landscape. Lutz, conversely, pays close attention to not only Brontë's childhood games and writing but also her early and profound losses of both her mother and two sisters (buried nearly directly under the family pew in the church where the father, Patrick, preached). In a characteristic passage, she describes how this pew was too short to fit the entire family without some members--usually Anne and Emily--having to sit turned away from the congregation. In Lutz's explanation, this becomes not a defiance of sociability but an effort to cope with the intense trauma of living in a death-infused environment.
One of the mysteries of the Brontë sisters is how three women in such remote geographical and literary circumstances could craft such brilliant fiction: Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's too-often overlooked The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. But by turning to the previous generation and exploring the literary tastes and writing ambitions of their parents, Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell, Lutz offers helpful context for both the feminist inclinations of the authors' novels and their immersion in the contemporary fiction of their day.
This is a gorgeous, long overdue account that examines Emily Brontë as a writer of landscape, and one of the author's minor strengths is her close attention to Yorkshire diction, with words like "flittermice" (a local term for bats) offering a sense of how place infuses Brontë's language in her choice of key terms like "wuthering."
June 18, 2026
(Maybe I am biased on the subject topic) I loved it
May 19, 2026
I really enjoyed this literary biography. From the very first well-chosen quotation, the author opens up Emily Bronte’s life in a beautiful way. It felt like sitting next to a friend who keeps looking up from their research to share some new and fascinating fact.
May 17, 2026
Excellent—this is just the kind of creative and engaging biography that I wished existed for Charlotte. I love how the author recreates Emily’s world, and the insight into her incredible poetry gives context to Wuthering Heights that I’ve never had before. I’ve always wondered how Emily wrote such a crazy novel, and this biography presents some solid ideas about how she might have done it—she was a genius. I think I need to deep dive into her poetry now…
August 12, 2026
Thank you Deborah Lutz, W.W. Norton and Company, and NetGalley for the ARC!
This biography is genuinely one of the best books I've read this year! Lutz really did something remarkable here. Not only do I feel like I have a complete account of the Bronte siblings (not just Emily), but I feel like I know them. Emily is the central subject of course, but her introverted and reserved nature meant that not many outsiders were allowed in. Because of this, we as readers get to experience the rather quiet and domestic life of Emily and the sisters who were her whole world.
What I learned is this: Emily Bronte is for the weird girls. Yes, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is a bit on the freaky side (one of the first dark romances one could argue), but Emily was just weird. She was reserved with most strangers, leading people to believe she was a bit cold and aloof. She took charge of the domestic household chores, preferring to work at home during the day and write in the evenings. She loved nature and animals, more than most people. She was crass and unconventional, stubborn until the day she died. Also, I think I love her a little bit.
Yet although I feel like I have a complete picture of who Emily was, there is much that still remains a mystery. There's a passage in the prologue of this book that I found particularly moving: so many Wuthering Heights readers felt akin to Emily, so sure that she must share the same values, the same thoughts even. Although it's an astonishing feat to be so relatable to readers after so many years, there's some things about Emily we still don't know. I really liked how Lutz continually asked questions throughout this chronological account, often speculating about things I myself was speculating about.
I think a good, detailed book about Emily has been long overdue, but I'm so glad we have this one. Lutz truly brought Emily back to life and I kept finding myself looking up from this book, disappointed to see that I wasn't rambling the moors with Emily and her beloved animals. Truly a must-read for the Wuthering Heights Heads out there.
This biography is genuinely one of the best books I've read this year! Lutz really did something remarkable here. Not only do I feel like I have a complete account of the Bronte siblings (not just Emily), but I feel like I know them. Emily is the central subject of course, but her introverted and reserved nature meant that not many outsiders were allowed in. Because of this, we as readers get to experience the rather quiet and domestic life of Emily and the sisters who were her whole world.
What I learned is this: Emily Bronte is for the weird girls. Yes, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is a bit on the freaky side (one of the first dark romances one could argue), but Emily was just weird. She was reserved with most strangers, leading people to believe she was a bit cold and aloof. She took charge of the domestic household chores, preferring to work at home during the day and write in the evenings. She loved nature and animals, more than most people. She was crass and unconventional, stubborn until the day she died. Also, I think I love her a little bit.
Yet although I feel like I have a complete picture of who Emily was, there is much that still remains a mystery. There's a passage in the prologue of this book that I found particularly moving: so many Wuthering Heights readers felt akin to Emily, so sure that she must share the same values, the same thoughts even. Although it's an astonishing feat to be so relatable to readers after so many years, there's some things about Emily we still don't know. I really liked how Lutz continually asked questions throughout this chronological account, often speculating about things I myself was speculating about.
I think a good, detailed book about Emily has been long overdue, but I'm so glad we have this one. Lutz truly brought Emily back to life and I kept finding myself looking up from this book, disappointed to see that I wasn't rambling the moors with Emily and her beloved animals. Truly a must-read for the Wuthering Heights Heads out there.
August 8, 2026
The author gives us a wealth of interesting detail about Emily Bronte's life, family, and work, and does a good job clearing up some of the myths surrounding her. She had a difficult job to do when so little is known about Bronte's life.
Sometimes, though, she spent a lot of time speculating about unimportant things or things we have no way of knowing -- Emily must have borrowed this book, must have admired that church, must have told Charlotte using a male narrator in "The Professor" was a bad idea (how could we possibly know that Emily thought that?) -- and spends almost no time on really intriguing speculations, like why the sisters started writing novels when they did, and how and why Emily made the transition from writing about imaginary kingdoms to using a realistic setting that she knew well. And what's up with that mysterious incident in Emily's teen years that Lutz hints at but doesn't go into or provide any sort of citation or documentation for, beyond one extremely vague possible reference in a letter? She says that it's "intrigued Bronte scholars over the years" but gives us absolutely no references to any such scholars or their writings on the topic to help us pursue the subject ourselves.
In short, all the attention to little details and skimping on big ones occasionally made it feel like she was missing the forest for the trees. I appreciate all the research and all the work that went into the book, but I just wanted a bit more from it.
Sometimes, though, she spent a lot of time speculating about unimportant things or things we have no way of knowing -- Emily must have borrowed this book, must have admired that church, must have told Charlotte using a male narrator in "The Professor" was a bad idea (how could we possibly know that Emily thought that?) -- and spends almost no time on really intriguing speculations, like why the sisters started writing novels when they did, and how and why Emily made the transition from writing about imaginary kingdoms to using a realistic setting that she knew well. And what's up with that mysterious incident in Emily's teen years that Lutz hints at but doesn't go into or provide any sort of citation or documentation for, beyond one extremely vague possible reference in a letter? She says that it's "intrigued Bronte scholars over the years" but gives us absolutely no references to any such scholars or their writings on the topic to help us pursue the subject ourselves.
In short, all the attention to little details and skimping on big ones occasionally made it feel like she was missing the forest for the trees. I appreciate all the research and all the work that went into the book, but I just wanted a bit more from it.
July 17, 2026
What I loved:
Lutz is a stylish writer, pleasant to read. Her decision to research “around” Emily (down to consulting local newspapers to see what the weather was like) was brilliant, given that so many of Emily’s papers are lost/missing. She succeeded in giving you a sense of what Emily’s days might have felt like. She also had some wonderful readings of Emily’s life experiences (her analysis of how the repeated reopening of Emily’s family’s burial vault shaped her imagination will forever change how I read her work, especially the grave-digging scenes of Wuthering Heights).
My grievance:
I take issue with the application of secular, trendy 21st century norms and questions to 19th century subjects. I understand speculation is inevitable when evidence is lacking, but some of this speculation felt like downright wishful thinking. Please do not try to tell me that because Emily once doodled a pile of corpses and someone getting whipped, she had “sadomasochistic tendencies” and would have been drawn to the TWO volumes of porn in an enormous library she had access to. Please do not tell me that because she used the word “surely” in an expression of faith, maybe it was actually a veiled expression of doubt. Please do not tell me that she probably would have found it funny when Anne wrote about a woman whose husband brought in a governess to his home to sleep with (the sisters literally experienced the devastation and humiliation of their brother engaging in an adulterous relationship within the family he tutored for. Why in the world would they find adultery in fiction funny?)
I fear this will be an increasing trend in modern academia (as when I was reading an excellent biography of Austen last summer but was suddenly, randomly confronted by the author’s question, “Did Jane Austen ever have lesbian sex?”)
In the absence of evidence, we have to deal with probabilities. We have to deal with people as they are, not how we wish them to be. Please don’t offer unsupported speculations in order to try to formulate a secular icon for you to admire.
Final verdict: my copy of this book is riddled with sticky notes and I took copious notes. I respect Lutz (and her book The Bronte Cabinet is not to be missed, btw). I would recommend this to any Emily fan, but I would say critical thinking while you’re reading is essential (as it always is).
Lutz is a stylish writer, pleasant to read. Her decision to research “around” Emily (down to consulting local newspapers to see what the weather was like) was brilliant, given that so many of Emily’s papers are lost/missing. She succeeded in giving you a sense of what Emily’s days might have felt like. She also had some wonderful readings of Emily’s life experiences (her analysis of how the repeated reopening of Emily’s family’s burial vault shaped her imagination will forever change how I read her work, especially the grave-digging scenes of Wuthering Heights).
My grievance:
I take issue with the application of secular, trendy 21st century norms and questions to 19th century subjects. I understand speculation is inevitable when evidence is lacking, but some of this speculation felt like downright wishful thinking. Please do not try to tell me that because Emily once doodled a pile of corpses and someone getting whipped, she had “sadomasochistic tendencies” and would have been drawn to the TWO volumes of porn in an enormous library she had access to. Please do not tell me that because she used the word “surely” in an expression of faith, maybe it was actually a veiled expression of doubt. Please do not tell me that she probably would have found it funny when Anne wrote about a woman whose husband brought in a governess to his home to sleep with (the sisters literally experienced the devastation and humiliation of their brother engaging in an adulterous relationship within the family he tutored for. Why in the world would they find adultery in fiction funny?)
I fear this will be an increasing trend in modern academia (as when I was reading an excellent biography of Austen last summer but was suddenly, randomly confronted by the author’s question, “Did Jane Austen ever have lesbian sex?”)
In the absence of evidence, we have to deal with probabilities. We have to deal with people as they are, not how we wish them to be. Please don’t offer unsupported speculations in order to try to formulate a secular icon for you to admire.
Final verdict: my copy of this book is riddled with sticky notes and I took copious notes. I respect Lutz (and her book The Bronte Cabinet is not to be missed, btw). I would recommend this to any Emily fan, but I would say critical thinking while you’re reading is essential (as it always is).
May 14, 2026
When I received This Dark Night (a biography of Emily Bronte), I was wondering how my reading and reviewing it was going to play out. You see, I am one of the three people left on the planet, who has never read any books by any of the Brontes (not Emily nor Charlotte or even Anne), so I wasn't sure if I would even understand any of the references that the book would inevitably make to Wuthering Heights, or Jane Eyre or Agnes Grey. I needn't have worried. In some ways I have been given a gift. Because when I go to read the aforementioned books, I will know exactly what inspired them, informed them, and breathed life into them. The author, Deborah Lutz, does a magnificent job of painstakingly dissecting Emily's life (and those of her siblings), while doing so in a way that does not feel like a textbook or an entry in an encyclopedia. Instead, the reader feels like yet another sibling, walking the moors or sitting by the fireside; a passive observer taking everything in, there but not seen. To that end, what a life she had! For a woman who spent a good deal of her life sitting and writing, I was still exhausted at the end of each chapter. So many tasks, so many responsibilities, so many expectations (many of them by Emily, on herself), and so much death! It's a wonder that people's brains didn't implode from the stress of it all. Even just adjusting to the constant cold and wind and dampness, and never being quite warm enough or dry enough, or in the case of food, not quite full enough. Emily Bronte used nature in quite the same way as one today uses a smartphone, as a distraction from self and the relentless pressure to be other than what one is. Interspersed throughout the book are snippets of Emily's poems and of her novel. I thought, "Well I don't know if Emily's writing appeals to me. It seems so fraught and melodramatic." But that was her life! And her sibling's lives as well! She wrote, in many ways, what she knew. If you are a fan of the Brontes, or even if you are just interested in the time period in which they lived, I cannot recommend this book enough. A beautiful biography, beautifully rendered. ** I received this book for free from the publisher, but all views are my own.
June 30, 2026
I loved this biography of Emily Bronte. The author also told the story of her family members, Patrick, Charlotte, Branwell, and Anne. Their stories were so intertwined with each other. I also learned about the poetry they wrote, especially about the kingdoms and stories they made up. One of Emily's poems was requested by Emily Dickinson to be read at her funeral. Other admirers of her poetry were Edith Wharton, Henry James, Mary Ann Evans or George Eliot. The author showed how the environment around Haworth was such an influence on Wuthering Heights. Great and informative book!!
July 5, 2026
A brilliant biography of an equally brilliant writer. “This Dark Night” is well-written and well-researched, expertly bringing Emily Brontë, the England that shaped her, and the moors she so loved to life. You really get a feeling for who she was as a person and how her writing developed (as well as deliberations on how it might have further developed, had she lived longer). Also expertly interweaved are interesting analyses of Brontë’s poetry, examined from both a literary and new-historicist point of view that I appreciated.
July 30, 2026
Beautifully written, with a surprising amount of detail into Charlotte's life as well (not so much for Anne or Branwell). Lutz definitely shone a light on Emily's interior world and piqued my curiosity. I read Wuthering Heights in my Victorian lit classes (and I don't need to revisit that landscape), but my professors didn't include Emily's poetry or any of the juvenalia—although I'm not sure I'd actually classify the "game" of Gondal as juvenalia, knowing that Emily "played" well into her twenties. Definitely planning to explore further into the Brontë universe!
May 28, 2026
A comprehensive account of the Brontë sisters, showcasing Emily. Much of this biography detailed Emily's determination to stand out as woman, which was evident in writing her classic novel WUTHERING HEIGHTS.
July 18, 2026
What if I told you I feel like I know you but we never met?
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