Overview

Emily Brontë (1818–48) was only twenty-seven years old when she began work on one of the most important novels in the English language. It took the world almost a century to catch up to Wuthering Heights, and it has taken even longer to know Brontë—an elusive figure, with a ghostly legacy marred by the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers. Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, Deborah Lutz constructs a portrait of Brontë, her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and the family’s tragic deaths against the texture of Brontë’s days as a woman both tending a Victorian household and crafting otherworldly fiction. Lutz traces Brontë’s passions from her animal menagerie to her beloved moors as she honed her fantastical poems and transcendent novel. This Dark Night plumbs the life and writing of this idiosyncratic woman, dark soul, and monumental genius.

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9781324037118

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Reviews

The fullness of Emily Brontë's unbridled life, ""bright-flashing"" and wholly original, is all here--her inwardness and wild inventiveness, her walking stick and writing desk and shreds of paper, her love of creatures and her singular voice. 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

Author Information

Deborah 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 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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