Overview

The first comprehensive biography of Emily Brontë in over two decades. Emily Jane Brontë was just 27 when she started writing the wayward and electric novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there's much that we don't know about her — most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire. Drawing on a vast quantity of unexplored archival materials, Deborah reconstructs the texture of Emily Brontë's days, bringing us closer to one of the greatest and fiercest writers we have, by showing us her creative process and her confidence in her strange art. This book has much to reveal to readers of Wuthering Heights, as we accompany Emily around the wild moorlands she loved so much. Also threaded through with the contemporary politics and events of the era (from the early labour movements of the Chartists and reformists, to the slave uprisings in the colonies), and authors and locals that Emily read about or knew (from proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to the masculine lesbian Anne Lister). Featuring illuminating readings of her poems, This Dark Night takes us inside the world of Emily's irrepressible spirit and wild imagination.

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9781399417082

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Reviews

Deborah Lutz reveals Emily Brontë to us anew in this fresh, compelling, and perfectly paced jewel of a biography. Lutz dispenses with the Brontë myth and gives us a far more moving and accurate portrait of a bold, innovative, emotionally attuned writer deeply rooted in her imagination, family, landscape, and community. This Dark Night is a triumph. * Heather Clark, Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath * Deborah Lutz’s extraordinary This Dark Night gives us a wilder and more wonder-filled Emily Brontë than any previous account of the famed sisterhood. Lutz knows her subject the way Brontë knew the Yorkshire moors, and her biography ‘blazes forth,’ as an early reviewer wrote of Wuthering Heights, with a rare brilliance derived from passionate and abiding engagement. * Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life * Deborah Lutz reimagines what literary biography can do, interlacing details of life and text with a luminous prose that achieves a kind of resurrection. Haunting and gorgeous, like a windy moonlit moor. * Natalie Dykstra, author of Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner * This Dark Night is an extraordinary act of biographical reanimation — not only of the strange, enigmatic Emily Brontë, who has never been more vividly rendered, but also of Brontë’s physical world, the smells and textures and sounds of her beloved West Yorkshire moors. This gorgeous book hums with vitality. * Lance Richardson, author of True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen *

Author Information

Deborah Lutz is a Victorian literature scholar who has been teaching and writing about the Brontës for decades. She was the editor of a Norton Critical Edition of Jane Eyre and a Norton Library edition of Wuthering Heights, and her book The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, was shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

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