‘This Dark Night’ by Deborah Lutz review

Emily Brontë is having quite the year. Fuelled by Emerald Fennell’s salacious adaptation of her only novel Wuthering Heights, Brontë has acquired a new generation of readers. Penguin Random House has reported that sales of Wuthering Heights rose by 132 per cent following the film’s first teaser in September 2025; by early 2026, that figure stands at 469 per cent. Visitor numbers to Brontë’s home, the Haworth Parsonage (now Brontë Parsonage Museum), have also surged. It is therefore apt that, hot on the heels of this renewed fascination in an author once dubbed ‘the sphinx of English literature’, Brontë should receive a comprehensive new biography.

Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night offers a densely painted reconstruction of Brontë’s world. Beginning with the Reverend Patrick Brontë’s courtship of Maria Branwell, a Cornish woman, and the formation of a family of six across various temporary homes, the biography quickly focuses on their settlement in the Parsonage, perched atop of the hill above what was then an emergent industrial mill town. Lutz moves through Emily’s brief punitive experience at the Cowan Bridge School (familiar to readers of her sister Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre as the Lowood Institution), her short-lived and largely unhappy period of employment as a tutor, and her similarly fleeting spell in Belgium, before following Emily home to the Parsonage, where she was content to assume domestic responsibilities. From there, Lutz charts Brontë’s pathway to publication: the preparation of her poems for the sisters’ joint volume in 1846, released under the pseudonym ‘Ellis Bell’, followed by the appearance of Wuthering Heights alongside Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey in 1847. The narrative closes at this point, for Emily Brontë died the following year, in 1848, from tuberculosis.

In telling the story of Brontë’s life, Lutz’s method is demarcated by two commitments. First is her interest in Brontë’s world and her place in it. To pursue this, she reconstructs what Brontë ‘wore, saw, heard, smelled, and felt along her skin’ using, among other things, weather reports, the diaries of her neighbours, and local newspapers. This attention to the everyday and the senses offers a thoughtful (and relatively new) approach in Brontë biography, and it is one well suited to Lutz’s established interests, which readers of her 2015 work, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, will recognise. The second is that This Dark Night joins an established tradition that frames Brontë in relation to the natural world and foregrounds the environment as context for understanding her. For Lutz, as for many before her, Brontë ‘brought the open sky, birdsong, and the peat bogs to life on the page’. The imagery is vivid and compelling, participating in a romantic imaginary that tries to enter the inner mind of a woman who conjured some 200 poems (or thereabouts, that we know of and survive) and, of course, Wuthering Heights. At the same time, Lutz’ environmental emphasis also opens onto Brontë’s preoccupation with darker worlds, such as the dungeons, caves, and graves that dominate her writing, as well as ‘the mortal body’. Neither strand is, in itself, entirely new, but the way Lutz binds them together through sustained sensorial attentiveness feels fresh and it sharpens our historical understanding of Brontë as a multifaceted and complex woman.

Importantly, This Dark Night delves into territories that earlier biographers have overlooked, such as, for example, the practical question of how the Brontë sisters managed menstruation, which Lutz answers by drawing on broader health histories rather than evidence specific to the Brontës. This kind of detail may not deepen our understanding of Brontë as a writer, but that is not its purpose. Rather, it is a reminder that the sisters were flesh-and-blood women negotiating a monthly cycle that shapes women’s lives – a seemingly obvious fact that can easily be forgotten amid the iconography and fandom that surround them. It is these reflections that exemplify This Dark Night at its best: Lutz’s care for the material, embodied conditions of Victorian womanhood, which lends biography historic specificity.

That said, the evidentiary limits surrounding Emily Brontë are troublesome, since there are relatively very few surviving manuscripts or first-hand documents by her. This Dark Night is attentive to this problem, yet at times strains against it. While Lutz often signals uncertainty through speculation and frequently asks more questions than can be answered, there are moments when inherited and unreliable narratives slip through. One example is her account of Emily’s merlin. Lutz repeats the story that Emily saw a merlin who was either injured or had been abandoned, brought the bird home, and named him Nero after the emperor. Yet we do not know how the bird came to be in the Parsonage and recent scholarship indicates that Emily probably misgendered it: her 1841 watercolour portrait of Nero seemingly shows a female merlin. This otherwise apparently minor issue unsettles the romanticised image of Brontë’s apparently intuitive communion with the natural world and exposes missed opportunities to press more critically on what Brontë knew (or believed she knew), allowing conjecture (historic or otherwise) to harden into fact. Elsewhere, Lutz extrapolates from a fictional detail in one of Charlotte’s childhood stories, suggesting that her sister had a ‘bull-like manner’, rampaged ‘wildly’, and may have ‘overindulged’ in her aunt’s beer cellar. In moments like this, Lutz’s move from childhood fiction to biographical inference risks producing fresh myths rather than revising old ones.

Despite these criticisms, This Dark Night is a vivid biography whose richness is most persuasive when anchored to evidentiary restraint. Charlotte Brontë once wrote that ‘An interpreter ought always to have stood between [Emily] and the world’; Deborah Lutz proves a persuasive interpreter. Her Emily is rendered with texture, even if the impulse to interpret occasionally risks standing in too fully for what the historical record can actually sustain.

• This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë 
  Deborah Lutz
  Bloomsbury, 325pp, £20
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Claire O’Callaghan is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University.