This Dark Night

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.