Deborah Lutz’s new biography of Emily Bronte — the first such work in over two decades — offers a considerably more nuanced portrait of this individual woman and idiosyncratic writer. Bronte is in good hands: Lutz, an English professor at Penn State University, excelled with her innovative 2015 book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects. Now, with This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life, Lutz has sharpened her gaze and drawn on previously unavailable manuscripts and notebooks to produce what is arguably the most comprehensive study to date of the enigmatic author of Wuthering Heights. [...]
Some of Lutz’s standout chapters are on Wuthering Heights. [...]
This Dark Night will appeal to all sorts, from the Bronte lay reader to the Bronte aficionado. It should be required reading for those who cast doubt on Bronte’s genius after having only experienced (or endured) Emerald Fennell’s recent overwrought and underwhelming film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, a textbook example of style over substance. Along with her analysis of Bronte’s “weird, witchy” masterpiece, Lutz provides insight into her mesmerizing poetry. At regular junctures, she reveals how Bronte’s life informed her art. The loss of her mother at a young age engendered a question that Bronte would grapple with throughout her career: “Where did life end and death begin?”
Lutz makes clear at the outset that certain chapters of Bronte’s story remain a mystery. At the age of 16, she got into trouble. About this incident, Lutz speculates that she may have become romantically entangled with a young man, “or a young woman.” Most of Bronte’s papers were lost, possibly destroyed, after her death, which prompts Lutz to wonder if she had started a second novel and stashed this unfinished work behind a wall panel in the parsonage or even secreted it out on the moors.
Despite the gaps, Lutz utilizes a range of sources to convincingly flesh her subject out. We come away from this riveting biography with the awareness that a prodigious talent was snuffed out prematurely. We might wince as certain traits and themes are described as “Emilian,” but otherwise it is hard not to be captivated by the Bronte that emerges. She may have been that “untameable spirit”: We see instances where she doesn’t suffer fools — or, in one jaw-dropping case, disobedient animals. But she was also fiercely intelligent, independent, principled, and driven. Martha, the Brontes’ servant, conceded she was “self-willed … but devoted and kind.” As a woman, she was out of step with her own time, but as a novelist, she was way ahead of it. (Malcolm Forbes)
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