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Deborah Lutz's extraordinary
This Dark Night gives us a wilder and more wonder-filled Emily Brontë than any previous account of the famed sisterhood. Lutz knows her subject the way Brontë knew the Yorkshire moors, and her biography 'blazes forth, ' as an early reviewer wrote of
Wuthering Heights, with a rare brilliance derived from passionate and abiding engagement.--Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
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Assured and dogma-free... [Lutz] is terrific on the details of Emily's life.--John Mullan "Literary Review"
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Engaging, often elegant exploration... Lutz's reconstruction is remarkable indeed.--Matthew Dennison "Country Life"
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Atmospheric and empathetic... [
This Dark Night] immerse[s] readers in Brontë's way of seeing the world.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
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Illuminating, comprehensive... [Lutz] does a grand job of bringing [Emily Brontë] to spirited life.--Caroline Sanderson "The Bookseller"
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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
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Deborah Lutz reveals Emily Brontë to us anew in this fresh, compelling, and perfectly paced jewel of a biography. Lutz dispenses with the Brontë myth and gives us a far more moving and accurate portrait of a bold, innovative, emotionally attuned writer deeply rooted in her imagination, family, landscape, and community.
This Dark Night is a triumph.--Heather Clark, Pulitzer Prize finalist author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
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This Dark Night is an extraordinary act of biographical reanimation--not only of the strange, enigmatic Emily Brontë, who has never been more vividly rendered, but also of Brontë's physical world, the smells and textures and sounds of her beloved West Yorkshire moors. This gorgeous book hums with vitality.--Lance Richardson, author of True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen
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Dazzling... Lutz paints a vivid portrait of a singular, peculiar writer. Readers will be rapt.--Publishers Weekly, starred review
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Refreshing... Excellent... This biography is, also, a wonderful book for writers on how to write the stories only you can.--Samantha Ellis "The Guardian"
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Gorgeously atmospheric and freshly illuminating... A uniquely enlightening portrait of an endlessly fascinating writer.--Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review
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Lyrical... Lutz shines light on the most enigmatic of the literary, secluded Brontë sisters.--Sadie Stein "New York Times"
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Quietly punchy... We get a good sense of Emily Brontë's personality.--Francesca Steele "i newspaper"
Publisher Marketing:
Emily Brontë (1818-1848) was only twenty-seven-years old when she began work on one of the most important novels in the English language. Two years later in 1847, she completed Wuthering Heights. It took the world almost a century to catch up to Brontë's masterpiece, and it has taken even longer to know Brontë--an elusive figure, with a ghostly legacy provoked by her early death and the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers.
Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, This Dark Night constructs a portrait of Brontë, her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and the effect of their sisters' and mother's tragic deaths. In the first full-length biography in over twenty years, renowned scholar Deborah Lutz sketches the days of a woman crafting otherworldly fiction while running her father's parsonage: writing interweaving with household work, daydreaming, and exploring the rough-hewn outdoors.
As she traces the influence of Brontë's life and work, Lutz follows how Brontë's fantastical early poems of the night sky, women rulers, and outsiders and rebels grew into the stormy, transcendent Wuthering Heights. Lutz also illuminates the overlooked ways that the legendary writer addressed debates of her time that still resonate today, including questions of gender and sexuality, race and class, and rapid industrialization set against the natural world.
From her menagerie of dogs and birds to the beloved moors that Brontë wandered and later emblazoned in her novel, Lutz depicts the passions of an author at odds with convention. Uniting the domestic and the cosmic, This Dark Night plumbs the life and writing of this idiosyncratic woman, dark soul, and monumental genius.
Review Citations:
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Kirkus Reviews 02/15/2026 (EAN 9781324037118, Hardcover)
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Publishers Weekly 03/16/2026 (EAN 9781324037118, Hardcover) - *Starred Review
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Booklist 05/01/2026 (EAN 9781324037118, Hardcover) - *Starred Review
Contributor Bio:Lutz, Deborah
Deborah Lutz is the author of six books, including
This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life and
The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Weld Award for Biography. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and has twice been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. She teaches Victorian literature and culture at Pennsylvania State University as the George and Barbara Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature. Past honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation. Her writing has appeared in the
New York Times,
Cabinet Magazine, and many other venues, and she is the editor of two Norton Critical Editions--
Jane Eyre and
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
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