BOOK REVIEW: THIS DARK NIGHT: The Life of Emily Brontë By Deborah Lutz (London, Bloomsbury, 2026)
What was the real Emily Brontë like? For years her only novel WUTHERING HEIGHTS has kept writers and academics wondering about the real mind behind this much-loved classic by one of Britain’s most famous literary stars. In Deborah Lutz's new and compelling biography of Emily Brontë, she draws from detailed descriptions in the Brontë notebooks and gives us a slightly alternative portrait of the mind behind the genius. It has long been suggested that Emily was the wilder, more eccentric of her siblings, prone to bouts of cruelty and unkindness. In her deeply researched biography, Lutz refrains from leaning on such conclusions. Instead, the book draws Emily as a practical young woman who, like her siblings, had her fair share of trauma, and yet proved herself capable of both keeping house in the wilderness and often harsh conditions of their home and of continuing a rigorous writing practice.
Lutz's meticulous research extends beyond the writing to all the physical remnants of the Brontë lives, the house itself, its surroundings, the open moors, the tiny precious books in which the siblings wrote their first stories. She takes these physical objects and binds them to the enigma of the Emily Brontë we know, painstakingly describing the small objects that were part of the siblings' lives. In doing so, she draws us into the small space of their home, taking pages from Emily and Anne's diaries to give detailed descriptions of their everyday life. Lutz rightly describes these diaries as "a new writing practice, one that feels distinctly modern, even avant-garde." The details on these pages are enough to draw us in, so that as we read we are sitting in the kitchen in Haworth watching the sisters cook, chat, and draw.
What Lutz does so expertly is keep the image of Emily Brontë real for the reader by drawing us into the quotidian of her everyday life, its ups and downs, and struggles. What she doesn't do is dwell on the erratic. The really famous moment of Emily's cauterizing of her arm after a dog bite is shown as a practical moment, not a symptom of madness. Lutz doesn't make a fuss over Emily's relationships with men or women; instead, she paints a picture of a young woman facing the bleakness of losing her mother at an early age and shows how the siblings pulled together, their love for each other, particularly Emily's fondness for Anne, and the way their creative spirit emerged from the bleak and dark moments on the moors. What Lutz shows us is that despite everything they went through, these sisters did not contain their creativity, they let it fly.
Lutz rightly describes the diaries of Anne and Emily as "a new writing practice, one that feels distinctly modern, even avant-garde."
As a writer, I was particularly intrigued by Lutz's descriptions of Brontë's writing practice. This is an example of a writer perfecting her craft from childhood, never giving up, believing in her own particular voice and the stories she wanted to write, without the influence of external voices. She wrote on small pieces of paper at any time, between the chores and responsibilities of her everyday life. Lutz also draws on Charlotte's letters to publishers, which reveal how diligent Emily's writing process was and how she wrote and rewrote her novel. This challenges the popular idea that WUTHERING HEIGHTS was written in a moment of wild passion; it is, in fact, a novel thought through and carefully developed.
I really enjoyed being drawn deeply into the world of Emily Brontë in THIS DARK NIGHT. It is a well-researched and carefully crafted book, written with great clarity, and gives us a portrait of genius more compelling than any myth we’ve inherited.
THIS DARK NIGHT:The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz (Bloomsbury, 2026) Pages 264