This Dark Night

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.

• PrefaceChapter One: Redbreast Early in the Morning, 1777–1820Chapter Two: Beneath the Church-Aisle Stone, 1820–1825Chapter Three: Night Sky, 1825–1830Chapter Four: Feeding the Animals, 1830–1833Chapter Five: Paper Crafts, 1834–1836Chapter Six: Queen Moon, 1837–1838Chapter Seven: Desperate Dunces, 1838–1839Chapter Eight: Sacred Whacher, 1839–1840Chapter Nine: Regive, 1840–1841Chapter Ten: A Chainless Soul, 1841–1842Chapter Eleven: The Great Navigator, 1842Chapter Twelve: Half-Inhabited House, 1842–1843Chapter Thirteen: Undergloom, 1844Chapter Fourteen: Fifteen Wild Decembers, 1845Chapter Fifteen: Like Wine Through Water, 1846Chapter Sixteen: The Eternal Rocks Beneath, 1846Chapter Seventeen: A Strange Book, 1847Chapter Eighteen: East Wind, 1848Chapter Nineteen: Wild and Keen, 1848Epilogue: 1848–1860sAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIllustration CreditsIndex

Emerald Fennell ’s hallucinatory adaptation of Wuthering Heights invited us to consider Emily Brontë in one light; Lutz’s painstaking account shows her in quite another. Far from the eccentric, isolated genius , Lutz’s Brontë is grounded in her material reality, from everyday household tasks to illness and grief.