A lot of trouble putting it down between chapters

Book Reporter reviews Deborah Lutz's This Dark Night:

After reading This Dark Night and having a lot of trouble putting it down between chapters, my biggest disappointment had nothing to do with how Deborah Lutz uniquely captured the essence of Emily. It was the tragic brevity of her literary subject’s life (1818-1848). (...)

What brings this unusual and ultimately tragic family into focus for 21st-century readers is Lutz’s consummate skill at weaving seemingly mundane details of everyday life into the fabric of their creative existence. Alongside the practical necessities of acquiring a Victorian education, maintaining a place in society, dealing with youthful emotions and romances, encountering illness and death, and keeping a motherless household running, Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their only brother, Branwell, lived energetically in imaginary worlds they created and wrote about together --- not only during childhood, but also well into young adulthood. 

Much of their imaginative fervor, especially Emily’s, was stirred by the climate and rugged landscape of the Yorkshire moors around their hometown of Haworth. Their intellectually liberal father, Patrick, was a local clergyman who largely home-schooled the children. He would outlive not only his wife, but all six of his offspring. 

By drawing so deeply on the real and imaginary worlds that the Brontës simultaneously inhabited, Lutz adds meaning and relevance to Emily’s poetry, which spans her entire short life: her seeming obsession with death, graves, memorials, ghosts and the supernatural; her passion for the beauty of the night sky and contemplation of the infinite; her keen eye for the subtlest changes in the flora and fauna of the moors on which she wandered at every opportunity; and her passion for the welfare of animals. She also captures Emily’s sometimes-painful transition into adolescence and adulthood, times in which she could be both an acute observer and vocal critic of human nature and relationships (platonic and erotic).

An especially endearing and often poignant element of This Dark Night is the generous amount of correspondence that Lutz includes between Emily and her sisters, friends and relatives, which not only serves to highlight the intimacy of their connections, but also brings the larger 19th-century world into their quite isolated rural environment. An important part of that wider world was the innovation of affordable rail travel that arrived in Yorkshire in time for Emily and Charlotte to journey overseas to Belgium for additional schooling, an experience that deeply influenced both their writing. (Pauline Finch)

The Telegraph lists 10 favourite literary advice-givers.

Helen Burns

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, 1847

“Life appears too short to me to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs,” the dying Helen Burns advises the furiously unhappy, rebellious young Jane in the opening chapters of Charlotte Brontë’s best-known novel. Helen’s pacific world view provides both moral and spiritual guidance for Jane, as Brontë’s wayward orphaned heroine negotiates her way into adulthood.

Yet Jane also struggles to reconcile Helen’s submissive sensibility with her instinct to kick against compliance as a woman’s sexual and political lot. The unwaveringly good Helen inhabits one part of Jane, and Bertha Mason, Rochester’s “mad wife” whom he has imprisoned in the attic, the other. The genius of the novel lies in the way it holds these feminine contradictions in balance. (Claire Allfree)

 Firstpost posts a 'Gen Z review' of Wuthering Heights, the book

I love Wuthering Heights from every inch of my heart. I love it with a passion that I love very few other books, and it is easily in my top three of all time. Like many others, I’d grown up thinking it was a romantic book, the pinnacle of romance really, a story between Catherine and Heathcliff.

The first time I read it, I was fresh out of school, in that angsty period between school and university when life promises potential but everything is uncertain. In all honesty, I didn’t fully understand it, and I am almost certain I didn’t enjoy it either. I don’t remember feeling much, which in retrospect makes sense — I was in an all-girls boarding school for most of my teenage years and wasn’t particularly social enough to have formed any real romantic attachment outside of it.

I read the book emotionally unprepared, which is to say, I came to it without having loved anyone yet. No wonder I found it disappointing. Where was the adventure? The tragedy? How much time were they actually spending together? (...)

The insults in the novel were fabulous — “he’s such a cobweb, a pinch would annihilate him,” “thou saucy witch” — the characters so wickedly themselves that I found myself reading passages aloud to no one.

Nevertheless, it was the central miscommunication that undid me. Heathcliff walking away two minutes before Catherine confesses that he is “more myself than I am, whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” It is almost the 1800s version of Normal People. I remember how wretched I felt, wanting to shake him. And then Catherine dies, and Heathcliff says “I cannot live without my life, I cannot live without my soul,” and there is simply nothing to be done with that.

The thunderstorm, and the fool who loves him

Most people who read Wuthering Heights expecting a love story come away confused and slightly betrayed. This is because it is not a love story. It is a revenge tale, and once you read it that way, the fact that everyone is so comprehensively horrible to each other starts to make a great deal more sense.

The structure of the book does something interesting to the characters, particularly the first generation. The whole story reaches us third hand — Nelly Dean tells it to Lockwood, who writes it in his diary, occasionally admitting he is condensing things. Nelly herself wasn’t present for a lot of it. (Read more) (Treya Sinha)

Clara lists books you should read if you liked the film:

 'La inquilina de Wildfell Hall' de Anne Brontë

Las hermanas Brontë fueron tres: Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848) y Anne (1820-1849). En el mundo occidental de principios del siglo XIX, las mujeres no tenían hueco en casi ningún ámbito, y menos aún en aquello que se consideraban tareas masculinas. Las tres tenían intereses literarios y las tres publicaron sus escritos para ayudar a su padre, que era pastor, a sacar adelante a la familia. 

Con menos de 30 años, publicaron relatos donde los personajes femeninos eran inteligentes, complicados y rebeldes. Emily solo publicó Cumbres borrascosas, pero sus hermanas continuaron su carrera de escritura. La más conocida de Charlotte es Jane Eyre. Anne fue una de las más olvidadas, pero cuenta con obras tan interesantes como La inquilina de Wildfell Hall.

En esta novela, cuenta la misteriosa llegada de Helen Graham y su hijo a la vieja mansión Wildfell Hall. El pueblo no sabe que esta mujer realmente huye de un pasado muy turbulento. Algo que va descubriendo mientras lee su diario el narrador de la historia, Gilbert Markham, que está enamorado de ella en secreto. En el relato se cuelan opiniones y actitudes de mujeres muy avanzadas para su tiempo que lo hacen aún más atractivo. (Lidia Lozano) (Translation)

The Edinburgh Evening News publishes  photos of Meadows Festival 2026, "including hundreds of people dressed as Kate Bush dancing together in the popular Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever event." BBC talks about a grant received by the Haworth Village Hall:

A community hall in a historic West Yorkshire village has been awarded a £74,800 grant to fix facilities which had fallen into "significant disrepair".

The Local Regeneration Fund approved the money to refurbish Haworth Village Hall's toilets, which have been described as unsafe.

A Bradford Council spokesperson said the works, in the village synonymous with the Brontës, were "vital to ensure the building meets safety standards and provides accessible amenities to meet the needs of the growing community". (Chris Young)