Deborah Lutz's new biography, This Dark Night, offers a refreshingly grounded portrait of Emily Brontë, countering the sensationalised image of the author as 'deranged' or 'unhinged'. Instead, Lutz presents a practical, steady woman who wrote while baking or walking, and who used tactile order as a springboard for creativity. The biography anchors its narrative in solid, everyday objects: the too-short bed Emily squeezed into, the pockets she stuffed with paper and moorland treasures, and the laundry she managed, including stockings marked 'AB5' for her sister Anne.
Lutz emphasises the tactile nature of Emily's writing, even counting a sampler she stitched at age ten among her earliest works. While other scholars dismiss it as copied platitudes, Lutz notes that one line from Proverbs—'Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?'—may hint at an early conception of 'wuthering'. The little books the Brontë children made are described as 'delightful, tiny objects', and the one-page diaries Emily created with Anne are called 'distinctly modern, even avant garde', anticipating stream of consciousness long before Virginia Woolf.
Wilder stories are addressed but not sensationalised. The tale of Emily cauterising a rabid dog bite herself is presented as following medical advice of the day. Her 'inwardness' is seen as a practical strategy for a writer managing a busy household. Possible romantic entanglements with a working-class man or a female teacher are treated as possibilities, but Lutz is more interested in how Emily might have learned 'androgyny and boldness' from Anne Lister, the real-life Gentleman Jack. The inclusion of the story of Emily beating her dog Keeper is noted as a slight shame, as it may have been invented by Elizabeth Gaskell.
Lutz excels on the theme of grief, drawing on her previous work on Victorian mourning ritual. She wonders if watching her mother spend seven months in a liminal state between life and death influenced Emily's writing about graves and 'the terrible passion of the gloomy aggrieved'. She calls Wuthering Heights 'one of the greatest haunted-house stories ever written', and describes how Emily saw the family vault reopened for her mother, sisters, and brother, making Heathcliff's desire to dig up Catherine's grave seem less bizarre.
By locating Emily in the texture of her everyday life, Lutz reads Wuthering Heights not as a crazed bodice-ripper but as a virtuoso debut from an author who honed her craft since childhood. The biography is also a wonderful book for writers on how to write the stories only you can, in snatched pockets of time, against impossible odds. Lutz uses Charlotte's correspondence to trace how Emily wrote and rewrote her novel, offering a fresh perspective on a much-mythologised figure.
