New Biography Examines Emily Brontë's Life and Writing

Deborah Lutz has written a biography of Emily Brontë that uses previously unavailable manuscripts and notebooks. The book is titled This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life and was published by Norton. Lutz is an English professor at Penn State University. Her earlier book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, appeared in 2015.

Brontë was born in 1818 and grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, West Yorkshire. Her father, Patrick, served as curate there. Her mother died when Brontë was three, and two older sisters died in 1825. From age six onward, Brontë wrote stories with her siblings.

She and Anne later created the fictional world of Gondal. Lutz notes that the loss of family members shaped these imaginative projects. Brontë performed household tasks, tended the garden, played piano, read, sewed, and painted. She also cared for injured animals and often worked or walked at night.

At 17, Brontë attended school for three months.

She later taught at another school but returned home. In 1842 she traveled with Charlotte to Brussels to study and later teach at Madame Heger's boarding school. Students there disliked her. The headmaster described her as stubborn and selfish yet noted her vivid imagination. During this period she wrote a long narrative poem about heartbreak.

1845 the three sisters began writing novels.

Brontë completed a draft of Wuthering Heights within nine months. The siblings reviewed one another's work in evening sessions. The novel was rejected at least four times before publication under the name Ellis Bell at the end of 1847. Contemporary reviews were mostly unfavorable.

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre appeared under the name Currer Bell and received stronger initial reception. Emily Brontë died of consumption on December 19, 1848, at age 30. Lutz examines how Brontë's life experiences appear in her poetry and in Wuthering Heights.

She notes that many of Brontë's papers were lost after her death, leaving some periods of her life undocumented.