A fulsome portrait of an untameable spirit
Deborah Lutz's new biography, 'This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life', offers a nuanced portrayal of the enigmatic author Emily Brontë. Drawing on previously unavailable manuscripts, Lutz presents Brontë as a complex individual shaped by personal loss and a vivid imagination. The biography explores Brontë's life, her writing process, and her unique character traits that set her apart from her contemporaries.
- ▪Deborah Lutz's biography is the first comprehensive study of Emily Brontë in over two decades.
- ▪Emily Brontë was born in 1818 and was the fifth of six siblings in a parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire.
- ▪Brontë's early life was marked by the loss of her mother and two elder sisters, which influenced her creative writing.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
“Emily — that free, wild, untameable spirit, never happy nor well but on the sweeping moors that gathered round her home.” So wrote Elizabeth Gaskell of Emily Bronte in her pioneering 1857 biography of the writer’s older sister, The Life of Charlotte Brontë. While Gaskell presented her subject and friend, Charlotte, as “a noble, true, and tender woman,” she presented Emily in a harsher light. She was a misfit and a misanthrope, a nonconformist and a law unto herself, a puzzle hard to solve and a person hard to warm to.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Washington Examiner.
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