This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, a Life

Lutz (Victorian Paper Art and Craft), an English professor at Penn State, delivers a dazzling, rigorously researched biography of Emily Brontë, the mysterious and elusive author of Wuthering Heights. Using weather reports, neighbors’ diaries, newspaper articles, and the Brontë family’s surviving possessions, Lutz attempts to “reconstruct the texture of [Brontë’s] days.” Born in 1818, Brontë grew up on the Yorkshire moors, where she led a nonconformist life. She refused to marry, preferring instead to run her family’s home after the death of her mother and two of her older sisters. This rebellion against society’s norms allowed her the freedom to pursue the two things she loved to do most: write and wander. Brontë was an insomniac obsessed with the macabre and fantasy worlds of her own creation. While she spent periods of her life away at school and abroad, they never lasted long, as she craved the solitude and liberty of the wild terrain of northern England. Though Brontë died at age 30, she produced a staggering amount of work, most of which she preferred to keep private. Frustratingly little remains of those thousands of pages (it’s not known what happened to them), but Lutz paints a vivid portrait of a singular, peculiar writer. Readers will be rapt. (May)