This Dark Night

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS PICK

'Compelling' -- Spectator

'A wonderful book' -- Guardian

The author of Wuthering Heights is brought back to life in this stormy biography set amongst the wild moors of Yorkshire.

Emily Jane Brontë was just 27 when she started writing the wayward and electric novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there's much that we don't know about her - most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire.

Drawing on a vast quantity of unexplored archival materials, Deborah reconstructs the texture of Emily Brontë's days, bringing us closer to one of the greatest and fiercest writers we have, by showing us her creative process and her confidence in her strange art.

Featuring illuminating insights into her poems and private writings, This Dark Night takes us inside the world of Emily's irrepressible spirit and wild imagination.

About the Author

Deborah Lutz is a Victorian literature scholar who has been teaching and writing about the Brontës for decades. She was the editor of a Norton Critical Edition of Jane Eyre and a Norton Library edition of Wuthering Heights, and her book The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, was shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She has published essays and articles in The New York Times, Out, Bustle and Cabinet, among many other magazines and journals. She holds the Thruston B. Morton endowed chair in the English department at the University of Louisville, and when she’s not teaching, she’s based in New York City.